


the warmth on the mountain

by nightmarechild



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Ancient Greece, Angst, Battle Couple, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Eventual Romance, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Historical Accuracy, Kassandra's Arms, Sexual Content, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-11
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2019-08-22 00:14:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 27
Words: 79,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16587014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightmarechild/pseuds/nightmarechild
Summary: Brasidas remembers lying on the lonely deck of his relief-ship and speculating what it might feel like to see her again.Sunrise. Fresh rain. Battle-frenzy. A deep belly-laugh, or a spinning blue-lotus high. The crush of a wave coming back from low tide, dense and hard, knocking the breath from him like a body blow from a sledgehammer.He should have known it would be like none of those. So many things about Kassandra are without compare.





	1. nostos

**Author's Note:**

> 6/5/19 - it's been brought to my attention that the episode 2 of the new Fate of Atlantis DLC adds some backstory to this character. i have not played it, so please consider the Brasidas in this fic based mainly on the historical figure and lightly on his depiction in the base game.
> 
> 6/15/19 - if you are arriving fandom-blind and want an idea of these characters before diving in, this 1.5-minute cutscene of their first in-game meeting should tell you everything you need to know: https://youtu.be/BzTSog0Yu64

In the summer of the 87th Olympiad, Brasidas of Sparta comes home from a long, cold campaign in Attika, sagging with the weight of secrets hoarded and lives taken in service of his kings.

The work is good, and it suits him. He is helping to end a costly war, to preserve his ancient customs and protect the lives and wealth of his people. He is the aegis that guards against the creeping danger of Athenian dominance over the waters that carry Spartan trade and culture to distant shores. With this refrain in mind, he is able to meet his welcoming party with a broad smile and warm embraces, oppressively and perfectly cheerful.

This is the upside of being a spy: there is little danger of them knowing the truth, which is that he is tired, sore, and heartsick.

Mercifully, he has arrived just a few months in advance of the Hyakinthia - a festival honoring the death and rebirth of Apollo’s mortal lover that will transform the stern straight lines of his home city into a mosaic of art, flowers and decorated caravans. Before long, soldiers will leave the front and come home to celebrate. Goats will be slaughtered to please the gods, and young men and women will dance and race nude in the streets in euphoria.

Brasidas needs this very badly. He has just spent half a year outside the valley of Lakonia, where pain is not a prize, where the connections between people are rich and precious and preferable to the glory of a good death. Now, he needs to be inoculated back into Sparta slowly, with wine and laughter - not with the skulls of infants at the foot of Taygetos, the darting shadows of _krypteia_ opening the throats of rebellious slaves, the wet warbling cries of boys dying in the training arena before they can so much as dream of a battlefield.

He’s careful to keep that thought folded neatly inside himself when he makes his reports to the diarchs. As usual, Archidamos is pleased with him; Pausanias is thin-lipped and smiles with practiced politesse. As usual _._

Brasidas reclaims his apartment in the heart of the city, resumes his seat at the war council among the ephors and generals that will one day be his peers, and waits to feel at home again.

\---

The first day of the Hyakinthia passes inoffensively enough. Brasidas drinks with friends he hasn’t seen in seasons, and watches the footraces, and threads flowers into the hair of all the dancers that pass their banquet table.

It’s strange to exist in the open after so long without a name. It’s strange to enjoy the taste of wine, even the good rich stuff from Chios, and allow it to dull his mind (he takes his neat now, like a Makedonian, inviting a scandalous delight from his companions). And the feel of the _chiton_ , tied carelessly over one shoulder and exposing too much vulnerable flesh, is foreign and uncomfortable after months in stiff leather armor -

But this is all part of it. A slow reshaping, like being poured hot and brittle into a blacksmith's mold - that painful retaking of a shape that seems to not fit as well as it once did. It has happened every summer, every campaign, since Brasidas was old enough to steal secrets for his country.

At sundown on the second day of the festival, a ghost of Sparta’s past comes back from the dead.

\--- 

It has been twenty years since anyone saw Myrrine or her children in Lakonia, but the wound of her leaving is still fresh. Brasidas himself remembers being in the peak of his training at the _agoge_ the night she fled the city. As difficult as it was to care about the small dramas of elites while surrounded by the stink of sweat and hard work and weakness being scrubbed away, the web of scandal had a way of gripping you tight and drawing you in.

 _The name of Leonidas, savior of Hellas and the last true Greek hero, is tarnished,_ it whispered. 

_His daughter has run away like a coward, and his grandchildren have perished on Taygetos. They could not bear the oracle's sentence._

_The line is ended. The blood of the warrior king will fade into obscurity._

Only it hasn’t. When Myrrine appears at the palace of the kings without warning or fanfare, dressed in corsair’s rags with her chin pointed high and a web of leathery scars displayed like trophies from a bitter violent life, all of Sparta seems to drop its flowers and its amphorae and look at her.

But Brasidas is not looking at Myrrine. Brasidas is looking at the woman beside her.

When she sees him, Kassandra’s measured frown breaks into a great beaming smile.

“Brasidas!” she calls. “Brasidas, do you remember me?”

The question is so absurd that he almost laughs in her face.


	2. khoros

In the days following Kassandra’s arrival, Brasidas's mood improves dramatically. Not because he is working with or even speaking to her, because there never seems to be time - but because she has caused a near-existential confusion in the generals of Sparta.

The reason, from what he can tell, is this:

Nominally, _politeia_ law embraces the parity of the genders. Childbirth is not dissimilar to warfare, and so the value of men and women to society is considered roughly equivalent (a notion that, from what Brasidas has seen during his travels, perplexes most of Hellas). A woman cannot enter the _agoge,_ of course,or hold political office, but she administers the wealth and property of her household, speaks in public forum, and is expected to run, wrestle, and throw with the best of her brothers. She is the protector of their homeland and economy when her husband goes abroad; her strength and his are coupled. A man who cannot recognize a woman as his equal, they like to say, is no man at all.

And yet, the fact that Kassandra so hopelessly baffles their attempts to classify her suggests that the kinks have not been entirely worked out.

“It’s not what I was expecting,” she says to him one day as they pass each other outside the palace. “This is the city that produced my mother, and her mother Queen Gorgo. A woman that wields iron and wins battles should be no shock to them.”

Before he can reply, one of the ephors rushes him away, admonishing him for keeping the kings waiting.

A lingering sense of dismay chases him into the palace. If this is the reception Kassandra gets from a nation that claims to recognize her power, what indignities must she have endured outside it? In Athens, or even Euboeia or Megaris, where they would see her as nothing more than a body in need of a master?

When Brasidas reaches the throne room, the kings are in the middle of a hushed argument. Their backs are turned, but he can hear them whispering ferociously, can see the cloth of their _chitons_ pull and tauten with every vigorous gesture. Every so often, Pausanias's hand flies up to grip Archidamos's shoulder in his patronizing way: _yes, old friend,_   _I hear you, but..._

Brasidas stands patiently with his hands clasped behind his back, and waits for them to be done. He feels certain that their disagreement is about to become his problem.   

The exile has applied for citizenship, the kings finally tell him with paralyzed bewilderment, and he almost asks who they’re talking about before realizing, _oh_. She is disinherited, yet she wants her rightful lands and ownership of her family home - which Brasidas thinks (but does not say) is a fair demand. His new assignment is, quite simply, to explain her to them - to draw the contexts and parallels they need to either give her a role in Spartan society, or reject her from it.

He wonders how long it will take them to realize that there are no parallels.  

\---

Eventually, the generals invite Kassandra to demonstrate at the _agoge._

This is half a display of respect for her accomplishments in battle, and half a thinly veiled effort to quantify her. She does them no favors by arriving in a burnished bronze cuirass, a rough-wrought male body that mercilessly interrupts the long arched lines of her neck and the dimpled muscles of her bare brown thighs.

Brasidas volunteers for the first bout. Whether she wins or loses, holding her own in combat with one of Sparta’s favored warriors will elevate her in the eyes of the kings. And, having already studied her during their brief collaboration in Korinthia, he feels he knows what to expect.

Kassandra waits politely for him to assume his own stance before drawing her weapons and falling into a shallow crouch, her gravity low and weighted forward, favoring aggression over defense. Her torso angles forward, trimming her width to present a smaller target. Slowly, she sways to find her best balance on unfamiliar terrain. As he first observed in that burning warehouse so many months ago, she holds her _xiphos_ unusually - directly in front of her, waist-high and parallel with her shoulders - and hides the broken spearhead behind her back.

Hand to Athena, Brasidas could just stand here and watch her move! These small ceremonies are hypnotic: hundreds of quiet physical calculations to prepare for a burst of motion. Her control of her body is complete; every part of her at rest except for the ones she means to use. Watching the muscles come alive in deliberate groups might be distracting, if he had any time to look.

Too late, he feels iron on his throat, the heat of a body at his back. A sharp, involuntary breath of surprise presses the tip of her spear - which rests almost casually against his side, between his ribs - into the cloth of his armor.

The generals stare at each other, astonished. Their voices stick in their throats like thick dark pine sap.

Kassandra steps back. Another chance.

But, is it a chance? Brasidas hesitates while lifting his spear again to the rim of his shield - reliving the moment over and over and trying to understand, realistically, if there is anything he could have done.

She lunges to his left, attempting to duck under his shield arm, and this time he’s ready - readier, at least. He angles his body, cutting off the opening, and slams the haft of his spear forward into the join of her neck and shoulder -

Or would, if she were still there.

Panic, hot and racing. He cannot give up a second bout as quickly as the first. Even if he loses again - and at this point, expecting anything else would be willful ignorance - it must be substantial, believable. Otherwise, it will look ridiculous. No one will believe what they’ve seen; they’ll think he’s thrown the match, or that she’s cheating, and then this entire foolish exercise will have done nothing for her.  

 _Think_ , he commands himself in a daze. Last time, she got behind him and the _xiphos_ came around the right side of his neck, so this time…

Brasidas slams his elbow backwards, a wild and desperate guess, and strikes a hard pad of gut-flesh. His heart jumps, and he uses the momentum to pivot, bringing his spear around in the tightest arc he can manage, swinging the point low in an effort to knock Kassandra’s legs from under her.

She shifts her weight ever so slightly, without a shred of superfluous effort, and the speartip breathes past her shins.

He’s too low now, overextended and off-balance, so he angles his shield to protect from the counter before bringing it up towards her chin in a vicious backhand swing. She redirects the force, batting it aside with the flat of her blade like a boxer turning a jab.

Brasidas takes a few steps back, scrambling for distance. Absolute madness - he’s breathless and aching from exertion, yet there she is, perfectly still in her steady crouch with her chest barely moving, a statue in contrapose. But her hair’s mussed, and she looks surprised, and that’s a victory, at least.  

Then - and it’s the belated nature of the action that makes it sting so much, as if it were just an afterthought - she hooks her foot forward around his calf and yanks his weight from under him. He goes down instantly in a graceless topple, cracking the back of his skull against the sand, tasting copper and hearing his own ragged groan as the air comes out of him like a bellows.

This, he thinks as he lies there and concentrates on breathing, is why Kassandra’s enemies are so good at hiding. This is why they cower behind masks and cryptonyms, and work through proxies and dead drops and impenetrable ciphers. Without the shadows, they would have to face her on equal footing, and there is no such thing.

The sound of sandals crunching on shale brings him back to the _agoge_ , and to his budding headache. Kassandra is standing over him, an anonymous black shape against the midday sun - but then she leans down and blocks out the corona that blinds him, and he gets a good look at her face.

Honey eyes wide and wet. Brows knitted, lips pressed thin, dimpled as if she’s chewing on the inside of her cheek. Terror.  

Brasidas’s heart skips, leaving a painful thumping vacuum in his chest - why? His mind races; does she think she’s hurt him? No, that’s not it. Her hand is out, extended palm-up towards him, but she’s not rushing to help, so she must know he’s fine. So then -

Kasandra bends lower, opens her hand further - _take it, please take it -_ and the neediness of it is utterly dissonant.

Then, with a jolt, Brasidas realizes what she's asking:

_Don't recoil. Don't shrink from me._

_Touch me, please. Show me you still can, because enough people fear me, enough…_

He takes her arm too quickly, just as she was too quick to offer it. A brief exchange of anxieties that, though it can't have lasted more than seconds, has taught him more than he feels he has a right to know. With a characteristic lack of effort, Kassandra hauls him to his feet and holds on just a little too long - and then people are approaching the dais and her warmth is gone, and no one but Brasidas will ever know she was afraid.

There are a few halfhearted quips in the aftermath, about how Brasidas is getting soft in his old age or what they must put in the water in Kephallonia, but there’s no bite to it. Tonight, the generals will go home and gossip to their wives in drunken awe, and the children will break curfew to play-act their favorite new legend with short swords held before them and broken spears behind their backs. One small piece of Sparta, at least, is won.


	3. pistis

Ask any Athenian to describe the diarchs of Sparta, and they will say “tyrants.”

Brasidas can see how this error began. Archidamos and Pausanias are styled _king_ , after all, a word that carries a sense of cruelty and jealous control. And the misconception serves their enemies well: in the same way that Sparta sneers at the Athenian obsession with debate and rhetoric, Athens uses moral superiority to fuel its propaganda. If democracy is good, and diarchy evil, then war becomes a righteous vehicle rather than a pointless bloody competition for water routes.

The truth is that the kings are far from all-powerful. They bend to each other, to the ephors, to any reasonable swell of public opinion. Where a king of old might seclude himself in his palace to rule alone, the diarchs know this behavior will invite murmurs of detachment and corruption - so they open the gates and invite citizens to hear and question their decisions.

It is clear that the kings are beginning to regret this precedent. While Myrrine grew up a daughter of Sparta and still bears some respect for its adamantine political hierarchy, her daughter has shown no such loyalty.

\---

For what feels like the sixth time in half as many weeks, Brasidas stands in the throne room and watches Kassandra hurl abuse at King Archidamos.

An aura of celebrity clings to her like pitch-fire. For the last twenty years, Sparta has known her as a dead child, the tragic inheritor of Leonidas’s blood, but now she is _real_ , and the city is beside itself with the thrill. First there was her barely-a-duel with Brasidas _,_ and then a roaring victory on the battlefield at Boeotia; every week, she returns from another of the kings’ suicide missions with the head of an Athenian commander. Attendance at palace forums has swollen like a river gorged on meltwater, all for the chance to watch the lost princess of Sparta pull down her loincloth and piss on the city foolish enough to think she could be forgotten.

She is not a citizen, of course, and has no legal right to be here, but Brasidas would very much like to see anyone try to throw her out.

“Old fool!” she thunders. “The world does not stand still while you tend to your ill-kept house. Spartans are dying in Megaris, and you want to keep your _krypteia_ \- the strongest of your men - in the city to kill slaves?”

Archidamos has no idea what to do. Pausanias, who has always been better at managing her, is away at the front, and for all his bravado, the older king looks small and lost.

The ephors attempt to help. A helot rebellion could be the end of Sparta, they start to say, but Kassandra is not looking for feedback.

“I’ve seen you settle your disagreements with a spar. Fight me for this, king. Maybe a blow to your head will set it straight!”

What could any of them do to stop her? The room is paralyzed; their society is based on loyalty, obedience, recognition of authority even when it may not have been fairly earned. No one has thought about what might happen if someone decided they simply did not care _._

From his spot behind Archidamos, Brasidas fixes her with a hard stare.

_Look at me, Kassandra. Look, before you cause more damage._

When she meets his eyes, magnificent in her leather and bronze and bitter fury, he flicks his gaze to the king, and back. Shakes his head. Wills her to understand that she is an axe in the foundations, a wound in the room; that all of Sparta is about to come tumbling down. A titan cannot stomp about so carelessly.

Her brow softens. Amidst a suffocating silence, she turns around and walks away.

Brasidas watches her leave, fixed on the movement of her hips and the nautilus whorl of her braid. For once, he does not have to hide his staring, because everyone else is staring too.

\---

When Brasidas leaves the palace a few hours later, Kassandra flags him down with a hushed call and asks him to walk with her.

They chat idly as they make the short trek to Pitana, the northwest village, past flowering almond trees and furrowed fields and makeshift gates of wood and red cloth. Temples give way to olive orchards; citizens in red-gold tunics to helots in animal skin. The sun is beginning to set over Taygetos, jabbing splinters of wine-colored light through its crags and canyons.

Brasidas’s stomach churns the whole way. He is acutely aware of the closeness of their walking, and that Kassandra has shed her armor for a loose-tied _peplos_ that billows and bunches at her thighs when she walks, and that they are alone.

The problem is not that he’s attracted to her; he’s known that since Korinthia. He has accepted it, come to live with it. He thinks of it in the same breath as hunger or fatigue. But that acceptance is contingent on her disinterest, and every step they take sets his thoughts circling each other like restless wolves: _what is this, what is changing, where do I look, what do I say, what do I -_

Their hike ends at a ledge overlooking the valley of Lakonia, shaded by the thick arms and weeping leaves of an olive tree. Blissfully unaware of how intently she’s being watched, Kassandra smooths her dress, motions for Brasidas to sit by her on the cliff, and - smile fading - hands him a yellowed scrap of papyros.

A chill rises in him as he reads it. Unwillingly, he understands the secrecy, the long walk from the palace - even the _peplos_ , which is not a signal but a disguise, meant to help them leave the city unnoticed.

Kassandra has brought him here to tell him, in the gentlest way she knows how, that one of his kings is a traitor.

His mind contorts in search of excuses. It’s a mistake, has to be. A word or phrase miswritten or misread - but no, _send Brasidas back to Sparta on his shield,_ that’s fairly fucking clear. He’s still alive, so something hasn’t gone to plan, but he can’t help wondering if the same would be true if Kassandra had not been hunting spies in Korinth last autumn.

Brasidas feels like a fool for so many reasons. He has always considered his loyalty a point of pride - the depth and candor of it, and how he gives it without question - but now, it makes his ears burn with shame. And to think of the juvenile thrum of his heart in his throat when he thought Kassandra was leading him here for something else, and how unimportant that seems now…

“Which one?” she asks.

He opens his mouth to say _Pausanias_ , no question: the smaller king with his thin smile and unctuous tone, speaking to him like being slathered in butter. It’s almost too obvious. His recent rulings against some of Sparta’s ancient criminal laws have made him unpopular, provoking the ephors to call him a poor leader at best and a cultural traitor at worst.

But, Brasidas forces himself to admit, wouldn’t they say the same of him, if he were less discreet about his own opinions? If they knew he thinks _krypteia_ are murderous filth, or that an economy predicated on slave labor is fragile and unsustainable, or that Sparta’s eagerness to sacrifice sons for glory will be its destruction?

Or, for gods’ sakes, that Kassandra should be allowed to have her fucking house back?

“I don’t know,” he says honestly.

Kassandra nods and looks ahead at the temple of Athena, red and sun-washed in the distance. They sit in silence as the last of the clouds loses its golden belly and sinks into night.

The loss of the sun turns moments to hours. A formless expanse of time, impossible to count. He spends it digging back through matted clumps of memory - wanting to help, somehow, to be more than an object of violence - but so much is missing. Moments unnoticed, whispers unheard, each of which could have been evidence that _this_ was the traitor-king who would someday trap Sparta in an unwinnable war and order Brasidas’s murder.

Nothing. Years of forearms gripped, smiles exchanged, orders given and taken, all without a hint of treason.

He feels oddly calm, despite it all. Still his mind bounds from one emotion to another, furious one moment and paranoid the next, but in the end, it is impossible to feel unsafe sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with Kassandra. Even unarmed and in commoner’s garb, betrayed only by the beauty she cannot hide, her strength coils in her like a sleeping caldera.

“Why show this to me?” The letter dangles between Brasidas’s knees, wax seal folded inward. “A secret told loses its power. You could have used this for leverage.”

Kassandra sighs deeply, rolling her shoulders back: the first breath after a long silence.

“I considered it,” she admits. “Using your ignorance, dangling the secret for the ephors to find. I could have waited for the traitor-king to lose his nerve and pay me for silence - or silence me himself.”

“Try to silence you,” Brasidas amends, and Kassandra hides her smile in the knot of her dress. “Neither king would dare. They’ve missed their chance now; you’re too public. Woven into the city like the leather in your hair. Sparta would unravel in their hands.”

She contemplates her dangling feet. “I know I could be subtler.”

“Not at all,” he says. “I have seen fame save more lives than invisibility. A spy discovered is easily killed, but if the world knows you - if people love you, and will notice your absence - then your enemies are powerless. They cannot touch you.”

“Or, at least,” Kassandra says with a sharklike grin, “they will think twice about it.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

The smile falters. She hesitates, lips parted with an answer half-formed.

 _Tell me you want me safe_ , Brasidas thinks into the silence. _Tell me you were afraid of what the traitor-king might do to me. Tell me you couldn’t bear the thought._

“I need allies,” she says at last. “And this - ”

Kassandra puts a hand out to touch the frayed edge of the letter, which means reaching over Brasidas’s knee, which means he has to try very hard to focus on what she’s saying. “This makes me think you could be one.”

She takes the papyros from him, folding it into the rope cinching the waist of her _peplos_ , and then - so quietly, so naturally that he barely notices - reaches back to slip her fingers through his. Holding him firmly, a blood-brothers’ grip, she brings their clasped hands up between them: his strength and hers, linked by the threat on their city and his life.

“I want to trust you, Brasidas. And I would like it if you trusted me, too.”

Her dark honey eyes are intense, concealing nothing. She speaks as if words are a nuisance, a barrier, as if she would rather inject her meaning into his blood. His mind is scrambled with the intimacy of a word like _trust_ : deeper and more suggestive than anything he could have imagined during their walk to Pitana this morning.

“I do.” He says it so quickly that she laughs, high and honest. The sound drives a shiver through him. “I trust you, Kassandra. Of course I do.”

“Good,” she breathes, and finally - _finally_ \- that sunglow smile reaches her eyes. “Good.”


	4. aspis

If unmasking the traitor-king of Sparta is a game, then the pieces are made of knowledge and discretion.

Kassandra has already forfeited the first round. As Brasidas suspected, her behavior at the palace forums is more than frustration at a mismanaged war effort; it's an interrogation. She has been testing the diarchs’ reflexes, searching for clues in the way they bring up their shields to deflect her daggers.

So far, the trade has been uneven. She has exposed her intentions but gained no knowledge in return, and every new challenge only improves the traitor-king’s acting. But now they have an edge: as cautious as their quarry might be with a hunter who stalks him in the open, he still believes Brasidas to be passive and oblivious - a _petteia_ stone to be moved and sacrificed for the greatest gain.

And a stone is not expected to fight back.

“Wait, wait,” Kassandra says, laughter in her voice as she catches his wild hands in a woefully misguided attempt to calm him down. “We must be defensive. Find the gaps in his armor, and strike only when it’s safe.”

Such a wondrous thing they hold between them, this secret. It would be so easy to wash away in its tide. “Remember what we stand to lose, Brasidas.”

There's wisdom in that, of course. Despite the traitor-king’s litany of advantages - reach, resources, and a vast network of agents yet hidden from them - his greatest power is that he holds all of Sparta hostage.

It is not enough to expose him. They must catch his body as it falls and lay it gently in the dust, or the city will fall with him.

\---

Brasidas’s spies report that Athenian triremes are being loaded for battle. In less than a month, a hundred ships swollen with wine, weapons, and hoplites will arrive at the port-town of Methone, on the southern tip of Peloponnese, to challenge Sparta’s borders.

As agreed, the news goes to Kassandra before it goes anywhere else.

She sprawls in the lamplight and studies the vellum map strung across the wall of Brasidas’s apartment, flower-dyed into neat red and blue blotches. Bits of tack and clay mark Sparta’s camps and commanders, clustered on the mainland, pointed towards Athens in a tight crescent.

“It's a poisoned battle,” she says, chewing her lip. “The generals are months away, holding the front in Attika. They’ll never arrive in time."

She turns to him, bronze skin half-lit, with oil-fire dancing in her eyes. The thrill of a scheme discovered - the first step towards fighting back. "I think Sparta is meant to lose Methone.”

Out of this rises their first plan.

Even if the traitor-king wants Methone ceded to Athens, it’s too important a foothold in the peninsula for the other king to let it go quietly. With the generals away, Brasidas - unlaureled, but trusted and popular - is well within his rights to claim commandership of the defense force.

Kassandra will feign disinterest and take a mercenary contract in Argolis. She will dawdle while supplying, just long enough for the kings to hear of her intentions. The spies will stick to her like stinging nettles when she leaves the city, and as soon as she can shake them loose, she will turn around and ride south.

There, with Brasidas the fresh lure and Kassandra the hook buried within, they will wait for the traitor-king to make a mistake.

\---

At first light, Brasidas petitions the kings for the relief of Methone.  

Voice booming, face schooled into a soldier’s mask, he asks to lead a hundred hoplites to the south, with helots to carry their provisions and a detachment of mounted _skiritai_ to scout their path. Sparta’s navy is no match for Athenian oarsmen with their precise rowing and ramming, so Brasidas will challenge them on the shore.

The performance is watertight, he knows it is, but still his heart beats fast and wild against his windpipe. He watches the kings, looking for the first faltered smile, the first stammer or hand raised in protest: which one will refuse? Which one will be the first to suggest, with a heavy heart, that Methone cannot be saved?

Archidamos and Pausanias both approve his proposal instantly.

Off balance, Brasidas barks his gratitude and dips into a stiff bow, barely holding onto his helmet. He feels every bit like the part he’s playing. The traitor-king has obviously seen this coming: seen, sidestepped, and made a plan.

Fine. He and Kassandra have made their own.

Brasidas’s lean army makes the journey in four days - the red of their cloaks a raw gash in the hills, in the cooling winter air. The earth rattles with their steps, heavy with weapons and armor, synchronized by the dry, bending tones of the _outi_ players and their war songs.

Despite his counterfeit bravery at the palace, he feels a grinding unease.

They planned to meet once before departing, he and Kassandra, but with his proposal so hastily accepted, there was no time. He has no idea where she is - if she’s riding towards or away from him, or whether she managed to leave the city at all. And his own inexperience haunts him like a badly knit scar: he has never commanded this many men, and every time he rides out to check their marching order, the scale of it spins his head with vertigo.

A hundred crimson cloaks. A hundred brittle breastplates holding the lives of his brothers. And countless more will be lost if his phalanxes fall: the helots, the _skiritai_ , the physicians, the fishers and farmers of Messenia who are counting on him to rebuff Athens -  

A long, shaky breath - private, with his back to his men. Nothing for it. Whether or not Kassandra comes, Brasidas has a duty to survive, and to win.

A week passes on the shore, then two. The army camps, forages, eats, and trains: running in place, keeping itself hammered and sharp for a lightning-strike of combat. Brasidas exchanges letters with the ephors in Sparta and the generals in Attika, body humming alternately with nerves and thrill and longing. Armed with spyglasses and nautical charts, his runner-agents ride up and down the coast in a tight relay and describe to him the Athenian fleet’s agonizing progress around the peninsula. 

At the end of the third week, he sees her.

It’s barely a blink of movement, red and bronze through the long leaves of an olive grove, but the sense of knowing is unmistakable. He recognizes the way she moves, the way she _would_ move if she wanted to be discreet - showing herself long enough for him to notice her, brief enough for him to doubt he’s seen anything at all.

That night, he lights an oil-lamp to cast his shadow against the canvas wall of his tent, and pretends to write a letter.

 _“_ _Brasidas_.”

The sound of his name, hissed softly through a blanket of night waves and seabirds, melts the tension from his shoulders. Three weeks apart has been harder than he would like.

“It’s good to see you, Kassandra,” he murmurs, and corrects himself with a chuckle: “Hear you, at least.”

“I sound better than I look,” she says, as if such a thing could be true. “I’ve been riding for two days.”

“Did something happen?”

“There was trouble leaving the city. The kings tried to keep me.”

Brasidas can’t help a short, harsh swell of laughter. “What? After months trying to get you out of Sparta, _now_ they want you to stay?”

She scoffs quietly, which makes him smile. If he concentrates, he can almost see the outline of her half-crouch against the tent wall, and the pads of her fingers where she’s resting her hand on the fabric.

“How far are they?” she whispers. “The Athenians.”

“Another week, my reports say. They left Piraeus behind schedule, and the winds have been unfavorable.”

A relieved sigh: “Good, that’s good - we have time. If the traitor-king moves against you, it will be late, at the last moment possible, so that…”

 _So that your death will have the greatest impact._ The sentence doesn’t need finishing.

“Never mind that,” Kassandra says softly. “Be with your men. Go, before someone catches you here smiling at your inkwell.”

“Wait - ” He feels a sudden looming emptiness, indulges the childish impulse to keep her here even though each moment is another chance for their plan to come to ruin. “Wait. Where will you be?”

“Near.”

Then she goes, and the tent is cold again.

He doesn’t see her for days, and as the battle approaches and his men begin to slam their shields and bray for Athenian blood, he wonders if there is any threat at all.

Has she been spotted? It's possible - despite her care in staying hidden, and his (admirable, he thinks) refusal to let his eyes wander openly in search of her, they have no way of knowing what the agents of the traitor-king have or have not seen. Or perhaps the trap has been detected some other way: even if Kassandra has laid a hundred false trails to the north, there are many ways to find out that she is not doing mercenary work in Argolis.

Or, he thinks abruptly, there was never any agent. Maybe the traitor-king is simply waiting for him to fall in battle. Another dead son, stretchered on the shield that failed to save him while his mother thanks the gods for the honor he’s brought her.

The night before the Athenians make their landing, Kassandra catches a black-cloaked spy coiled in the crossbeam of Brasidas’s tent.

The whole thing only takes a few heartbeats. She throws the woman down from the rafters to the war table, interrupting his meeting in the most appalling way - leaping down after her, pinning her, slitting her from groin to sternum and spilling the pink ropes of her intestines across the sheepskin map.

The men bellow in shock and knock over their stools in frenzied disgust. Blood and bowels wash Brasidas’s wooden pawns to the ground. The ivory-hilted _kopis_ that would have opened his throat clatters at his feet.

Kassandra is the only stillness in the chaos she's caused, in the raw quicklime explosion of shouts and swears and weapons drawn in panic. With a shudder that seems to take her from neck to spine to the balls of her feet, she settles back on her haunches, straddling the twitching hips of his almost-murderer. Hands on her thighs, eyes half-lidded with an emotion Brasidas wishes he understood, she tilts her head back and breathes as if the world has been lifted from her chest.

\---

At last, having calmed his captains and instructed the helots to save as much of the map as they can, Brasidas leaves the war tent.

He half expected Kassandra to be gone again. But then he finds her standing a little ways off with her back turned, instantly recognizable by her braid and her breastplate and the impossible geometry of her bare shoulders. He follows her gaze out to sea, where half a dozen dim orange lights quaver gently on the horizon.

The fleet is here. With a deep lurch, Brasidas remembers that in less than ten hours, he is expected to lead a hundred men to victory or death.

Kassandra turns around as he approaches. She hasn’t gotten a chance to wash, and bears a thick, eerie red slash across her nose and mouth where the assassin spat blood in her face.  

He has imagined this reunion for the last month - planned out what he would say, how he would laugh and embrace her and celebrate the end of their long separation, the success of their gambit - but now that the moment has come, he finds that all he can do is take her proffered forearm and hold it tightly as the words fail to come.

How many times has she done this, he wonders? Stood quietly between him and an unmarked grave, looked placidly at him moments after, and said nothing?

When Kassandra finally speaks, her voice is rough and cracked with disuse, and the most wonderful thing he's ever heard.

“I won’t field tomorrow.”

Brasidas feels his eyebrows go up in surprise. Too late to feign indifference. It’s never occurred to him that Kassandra might not want to take part in the fight for Methone.

“Why?” he asks. But as the word comes out, he thinks: perhaps he knows. Perhaps Kassandra has already won her battle, a contest of baited hooks, of black-clad women and their poisoned daggers, and this - a matter of nations, of simple honor and a soldier’s duty to his people - is his trial alone.

But Kassandra has a different answer:

“Because I will dilute your glory.”

She says it plainly: not a boast but a fact, carefully considered. He doesn’t understand, and it must show on his face, because she sighs and continues: “In Sparta, they are beginning to talk. They are looking at me a different way, giving me new names. Titan, demigod - ”

It's true, he realizes. A fresh memory comes into his head: fearful whispers exchanged in low tones among his own captains just moments ago, as he left his war tent painted with her destruction.

“They are cheap words,” she says softly, “They cost nothing to say, but they have an echo. If I am with you on the beach, those words will eclipse the truth.”

“Which truth is that?”

“That you will win.”

Hearing it raises gooseflesh on his neck. Such a simple thing, but her tone is steady, with a calm oracular finality that makes it sound like a thing already done. A swell of affection - real, terrifying - threatens to swallow him.  

“What Brasidas of Sparta does for Methone tomorrow, he does by his own valor,” she says. “And his victory will have its own echo.”

\---

Arranged on white sand like a line of bronze shells glinting in dawnlight, Brasidas and his hoplites stand face-to-face with what any other army would call death.

They are outnumbered, as he knew they would be - three Athenians at least for every Spartan. More wait just asea, stamping their spears on the hollow decks of their triremes.

No one rides out. No emissaries seeking settlement; no war party requesting a peaceful surrender. Perhaps they think a force this small is not worth the horses.

Standing alone before his army, Brasidas sets his feet apart and draws himself up to full height. He slams the haft of his spear into a thick plate of shale underfoot on the rocky shore, chosen to resonate, and bellows:

“LEAVE.”

Even in the cushion of thick sea air and crashing surf, his voice carries. A cluster of seabirds chitters in their departure. The Athenians shift in their neat lines - silent, unreadable.

And then they charge.

The approach is artless, but their formation is tight in the ways that matter. At Brasidas’s shout, a volley of javelins glances noisily off the Athenian shield wall. They brace against the impact, off balance for a heart-stopping moment.

He watches them: how they react, how they recover. They lift up, in rolling waves like a great metal centipede, and advance.

Again, he says.  

Behind their lizardskin of locked shields, the helots shuffle more javelins to the front. A second volley, and a third, and then the men ladder together to prepare for the push -

There: a falter. A lurching blue-and-white ripple where the phalanx wavers, tries to surge forward when their wall is tested. These are the weak ones, the excitable ones, and they are on the left.

Brasidas divides his column in two with a sharp gesture of his spear and thunders _elpis,_ a word that in their battle-code means “false retreat.” The left flank of his army recedes as a morning tide sucked from the shore, and half of the Athenian phalanx follows as if pulled by an invisible string, whooping in triumph and battle-lust -

Such arrogance, Brasidas thinks, to believe you have made Sparta retreat.

The Athenian trierarch is screaming, shredding his voice in warning as he tries to control his men, but you cannot stop an avalanche. His formation stretches and dissolves. His soldiers panic, scrambling to fill the space left by their charging comrades. The blue and pink of armor and flesh shows through a yawning gap in the mosaic of their shields.     

Brasidas brings the left flank back around, forms his men into a wickedly sharp pick, and chisels through the hole.

It is known across Hellas that once a Spartan phalanx has broken your line, you are done. The best you can do - infiltrated, gnawed through by hoplites feasting inside you like piranhas, eating your guts with spear and sword - is drop your shield so that you can run faster.

The beach chokes on Athenian bodies. They buckle like a rotting scaffold - not just the foremost phalanx but the one behind it, and the half-column behind that, as they see the bronze and bones and feeding frenzy of crimson capes on bloody flesh. They are in disarray. Screaming above the swell of the surf, they cast aside their weapons and throw themselves back into the sea towards their boats, where Spartan spearmen chase them down and crush their skulls into the tide.

When the morning has passed, Brasidas stands on red sand with his shield on his back and his helmet tucked neatly under one arm. The winter sun and chilly ocean wind are a pleasant companion as he watches the queasy bob of the triremes - looking dismayed, somehow, as if the vessels themselves are numb with shock at their sudden emptiness.

Methone is defended. Sparta has suffered no casualties. The Athenians leave their dead, turn around, and go home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> huge thank you to everyone who has stuck with me this far! I so so so love and appreciate all your feedback (and your patience with my obsession with classical history) and I'm so glad we can share our love for this game and pairing with each other :)
> 
> (p.s. I'm @plummeting-plum on tumblr if you want to be friends. I reblog kassandra's arms a lot.)


	5. chovoli

The laurel is a beautiful thing: a slash of beaten gold with its long horseshoe stem and crinkled, mica-thin leaves. It’s so vivid that it looks like a trick - an errant brushstroke on the somber canvas of the throne room.

Locked in his shallow, bent-waist bow, eyes fixed on the floor while he receives Sparta's highest honor, Brasidas makes a note to take a closer look at it as soon as he can remove it from his head.

Pausanias presides at the laureling. His compliments are lavish, and unusually sincere. He speaks of initiative, of quick thinking and adaptability: the cunning to see how the game board is set, to absorb and calculate the strengths and weaknesses of both sides, and to forge that into victory.

After a pained pause (Brasidas can imagine his eyes sliding to Archidamos, a performance of obligation, _because you want me to say it_ ), he supposes the courage and valor are worth mentioning, too.

At their command, Brasidas straightens, noticing again how light the laurel is - barely a touch on his brow. Pausanias's smile is muted today, replaced with something Brasidas much prefers: a quiet recognition of skill, more genuine than the usual veneer. Beside him, Archidamos looks ready to weep, gruff and proud as a father.

A traitorous warmth rises in Brasidas’s gut. A sense of filial pride, the peal of _love me, honor me_ etched into all Spartan boys like an epitaph, and he forces himself to remember:

One of these men wishes you had died.

One of these men has recently found himself on bended knee, explaining to some nationless cryptarch in a bone-white mask that the trade of Methone has not gone according to plan.

Abruptly, both kings look past him towards the entrance to the throne room with a familiar dread, and Brasidas fights down a smile.

Kassandra is here. Looming in the crowd, making herself known. Speaking with her presence alone, as if to say _try it_.

It's satisfying, in a way. The work they did in Methone was defensive, exposing their alliance without giving any leverage in return, but he has never felt safer. It will be some time before poisoned daggers are pointed at him again. The traitor-king knows now - by the cheers rising in the throne room and the distant corpse of an assassin left for the vultures on Methone’s white shore - that Brasidas is under Kassandra's protection.

\---

That night, they drink wine in his apartment and discuss the clues.

“Archidamos.”

Cheeks painted pink, Kassandra slaps the papers strewn on the table for emphasis, with a heedless confidence reserved for the very stupid and the very drunk. “These orders bear his name, and they carry his seal. Only the guilty king would send his dogs to spy on me.”

Brasidas swats the air with one hand, as if waving away an insect. “Unless they are also orders to keep you away from Methone, it’s inconclusive. There are other reasons to follow you. Both kings are nervous. Both of them watch you like wolf-stalked deer.”

Perhaps empowered by wine, perhaps just happy for the excuse, he adds, “I would watch you, too.”

Kassandra looks at him. A shot of silent clarity. Committed to the pretense of being too drunk to notice, he goes on: “Besides - Archidamos wanted peace.”

“Peace?” she demands, as if stunned the word exists, “What do you mean?”

“When the League elected to go to war two summers ago, Archidamos voted to maintain the truce. Pausanias is the one that argued Athens was expanding too quickly. He warned they’d grow fat on the tribute of their conquered islands, and swallow all of Hellas with their greed.”

“A speech fit for a symposion.” Kassandra takes another swig from the clay jug beside her. “I’d sooner suspect a dog for chasing its tail. All young Spartan men want war - even Pausanias, clever as he is.”

 _I don’t_ , Brasidas almost says, but finds the words catching in his throat.

Strange. He is in his own house, safe with a woman he trusts with his life, and still, he cannot bring himself to say a thing as simple as _I do not think as they do_. Cannot speak, even privately, of the sickness he sees in his people.

Kassandra's face lights like a stoked hearth. She sits straight and leans forward and drums the table: “Brasidas!”

(The thrill of his name in her voice a bothersome distraction, amplified by the wine - )

“The generals were clustered in Attika, weren’t they?” she says. “Too far north to return. None were left to defend the flanks; it made a perfect stage for losing Methone. Which king made that decision?”

Brasidas closes his eyes and visits the memory of war councils many seasons past - matching words to faces, sorting through webs of discussion and argument to trace back the decisions to one voice, to -

“Archidamos,” he says. “He had the final word on every deployment. He must have known it would make Sparta vulnerable to attack by sea, where she is weakest. But…”

“But?”

He shakes his head. “It was a mistake, to be sure, but a malicious one? I might have made the same decision, at the time. We had no way of knowing Perikles would flee, and draw his people inside the Long Wall. Or that they would weather our assault this long.”

Thwarted, Kassandra slumps back with a frown. The fold of her arms draws out the hard creases of her muscles. “Just as likely an error of judgment, then. Kosmos has a far reach, but I suppose some things are just mistakes.”

“Kosmos?”

Silence falls over them. This is the first he has heard her name her enemy. The room feels suddenly claustrophobic - suffocated by the word and the vastness it implies. “Is that what they call themselves?”

“The world and the heavens,” Kassandra says with a tight nod. Darkness in her eyes. “Such vanity.”

Vanity or not, the name is apt. On the diagram they’ve drawn to map it out, the lines of its power stretch endlessly like a web, like a cage. This thing called Kosmos is not just one king of Sparta, but a cancer growing in every corner of Hellas, in councilmembers and magistrates and freemen and slaves. The reach and scale of it is difficult to comprehend.

Desperate to get _somewhere_ , to chip away at this towering wall whose edges he cannot see, Brasidas makes one last attempt: “The assassin was a woman. That says Pausanias.”

Kassandra chews on her lip. “Maybe so. I can’t see the old man trusting a woman with a bloody thing like murder.” And then she shakes her head, sighing deeply: “But then, it’s all theater, isn’t it? Kosmos thinks they are beyond structures, beyond prejudice. They are artists of manipulation. If they’ve taken Archidamos, everything he does - including his disregard for my sex - is mimicry.”

She leans back on the heels of her hands, glaring at the ceiling with the frustration of a woman no longer as drunk as she wishes to be. Helplessly, Brasidas’s eyes go to her throat, a long unbroken line from collarbone to chin, where small precise muscles work as she speaks. “None of it _sticks,_ Brasidas. None of it is what we need - a confession, a testimony. Something written, or avowed, at least. Otherwise, it’s just guessing. But, on the subject of the assassin - ”

Kassandra sits up and rolls her shoulders back, as she always does when she feels restless. Rooting briefly through a leather pouch on her belt, she brings out what looks like a snarl of parchment and carefully unspools it across the table.

A long strip of papyros, no wider than a thumb. Fully unwound, it might stretch from floor to ceiling with length to spare. Brasidas stares at it with his lip between his teeth, haunted by an implacable sense of recognition.

“What is it? Do you know?” Kassandra watches him intently, perhaps encouraged by his reaction.

“No,” he says, uncertainly, his mind blank. “I don’t think so. Where did you find it?”

“On the assassin’s body, sewn into her _strophion_. I had hoped they were orders from the king, but…”

She turns the papyros over to reveal that it’s blank on both sides. “Ah, well. For sending her own message when her task was done, I suppose.”

With that, she rises from the table, leaving him alone for a moment with the atlas of their enemies stretching before him like a labyrinth.

He has many questions about Kosmos. Their goals, he thinks, are clear enough - protract the war and destabilize the major powers of Hellas, so that loyal oligarchs may be installed in their stead -

But what _is_ it, exactly? A secret society, a cult? Is their creed one of philosophy or religion? Are they deluded, rational, or chaotic? Did they create the pressures that broke the truce two years ago, or did they simply lance the boils that had already formed?

He looks up to find Kassandra horsing around with his laurel wreath - strutting back towards the table with chin up and chest puffed in her best imitation of a Spartiate elite - and blinks with the whiplash.

“Ah,” he says. She glances down at him with a delightful little smile as he attempts to understand what he’s seeing. “We’re done being serious?”

“How dare you?” she sniffs. “A Spartan general is _always_ serious.”

She hovers just out of reach. A tremor seems to hang in the air between them.

In one unbroken motion, Brasidas rises and grabs for the wreath, but Kassandra spins away effortlessly, golden leaves resting in the waves of her hair, honey eyes glinting in lamplight.

Part of him is mortified. If they were to be seen like this - Sparta’s unruly demigod and newly laureled hero, play-fighting like children grabbing for a toy -

_Blame the wine, you can always blame the wine._

With a long-suffering sigh, Brasidas makes to sit back down - then erupts mid-turn, releasing coiled muscles to leap at her as if opening combat.

Kassandra’s shriek of delight fills the apartment, a glorious sound that warms him through. She dodges away from his lunge, and he throws out a foot to trip her; with a gasp she dances over it, but the upset gives him time to get between her and the door.

Her back flattens against the wall. Cornered, breathless with laughing, Kassandra lifts the wreath from her brow and holds it overhead: an absent-minded attempt at keepaway. The round bow of her lips is drawn in satisfaction. The laurel is within reach - he's taller than her, just barely - but he makes no real effort to take it.

_Blame the wine._

Yes, maybe that would be best: to say that the head-spinning drum of his heart against his ribs is because of drunkenness and not defeat. That her joy - her smile and rich laughter, so easy and free - is not everything he wants.

Her breath calms at last, movement only in the slow roll of her shoulders. Gently, she sets the wreath down, resting it in his hair and drawing back to admire her handiwork.

“I watched you,” she murmurs. “On the beach.”

Brasidas’s voice feels thick, unsteady; his throat dry. “What did you see?”

“A marvel,” she says simply. “You deserve this. More than any other, you deserve it.”

She’s there. Right there in front of him, raw-gold eyes and scar-slashed lips and power in every inch of her, and it would be so fucking easy to blame the wine -  

But there's nothing left to blame, not really. No veil to hide behind. The wine is gone, as is his pretense. In its place, there is only sharpness, unwelcome clarity - a jarring recognition of the error he is about to make.

He steps back. Kassandra’s face is unreadable.

“I owe it to you,” he says, clumsily, trying to regain his balance. “This honor, and any that come after it.”

If she’s surprised at the retreat -

( _Why would she be?_ )

\- she conceals it with an easy laugh and a roll of her eyes.

The moment goes, and with the respectful distance between them restored, they return to the safety of hard work. Hours later, speaking in low tones as they move flags and stones across the map of Kosmos, they fall asleep at opposite sides of the table, warmed by furs and oil-lamps and the steady comfort of trust.

Night passes in a blink, and Brasidas wakes to find Kassandra there, balanced on splayed hands in a splinter of light through his east window.

He’s seen this before. Her morning exercises, still as ice: serpentine poses held for minutes on end with all her weight on a single muscle. He remembers waking to it in the months before Methone, when she made a habit of staying through the night, drowsy from long days of planning or wary of spies watching his door.

Her skin is taut, sweat-slick. Her breath whispers through her lips, a steady metronome in the morning calm.

He’s not quite sure what triggers it - the hypnotic movements, or the painful lucidity after a night of drinking, or just the peace of the moment, nothing in the world but them - but he realizes that he knows what the assassin was carrying.  

“A _skytale_ ,” he says, and Kassandra’s eye cracks open. “It’s a message, a code. I know how to break it.”


	6. gymnos

The theory of codebreaking is simple and elegant. Say one thing; mean another.

Take the _skytale -_  popular with Spartan generals in a multi-fronted theater of war, where the distances between the army’s vanguards can span regions. Where a spy can be caught and coerced, or a letter forged or intercepted, the _skytale_ takes a message and scrambles it so that only the proper key can reveal its meaning.

It works like this: a long strip of leather or parchment is wound tightly around a rod - a spyglass, a slender vase, a whittled branch - and the plaintext written across its coils. Once unraveled, the letters seem nothing more than nonsense, like the babbling of an infant - but wrap it again around the right key, and the letters lock into place.

It’s a classic, reliable thing, favored when speed and accuracy are the difference between victory and rout. Its only flaw is a lack of subtlety: once you have the ciphertext in hand, the method is obvious.

(Obvious unless you are drunk and mesmerized, and your mind is busy with things unrelated to spycraft. Mercifully, Kassandra has not seen fit to tease Brasidas for his slowness.)

They’ve made progress, to a point. Holding the blank  _skytale_ over the heat of a fire revealed the scrawl of plant-milk ink burned brown on its surface. And the haft of a heavy spear as a key has yielded a few legible words: apple, mother, ram -

And then, after a few wraps, it all goes to gibberish.  

It has to be misdirection. A sophisticated encryption will have many solutions, only one of which contains the truth. So they keep trying and trying until the floor of Brasidas’s apartment looks like a joke, covered in cylindrical items of varying lengths and thicknesses, like a wolf’s den strewn with bones.

“Or like the thrill of battle wasn’t enough to satisfy you,” Kassandra says, her voice trembling with laughter.

Brasidas is just tired enough that this is funny. He tosses their latest attempt at her - an _aulos_ flute, borrowed that morning from a puzzled palace musician - and she dodges it with a heady giggle.

“We’ll rot here if we don’t take a break." She looks out the window, at the colors of sundown. “Come. Let’s join the living.”

\---

Over the years, Brasidas has come to prefer the night.

It began as a precaution. The hard-worn habit of a spy is to seek darkness - even the quietest footfall can be betrayed by a flash of sun off weapons or armor - but now that there is no danger in being seen in the open with Kassandra, it’s become a question of comfort.

Sparta feels warmer, somehow, under the moon. Still and quiet as a winter lake, without the whispering currents that make daytime exhausting. Brasidas loves his people, and wants to keep loving them, and watching the flicker of oil-fire in windows across the valley makes it easier to think of them as good and honest, busy with their own affairs, with no need to remark on his.  

They settle at an old haunt, a rocky bluff near his apartment just south of the temple of Athena, and Kassandra stretches like a cat in the rosy light of the brazier.

Relief rolls off her like sea surf. She prefers the dark too, for similar reasons: if there are no citizens in the streets, there can be no pointing. No gawking or murmurs of worship, no mortal eyes cast down in deference, no calls of titan or demigod or Athena incarnate -

(“What next?” he remembers her fuming one night on this very hill. “Will they decorate their cows in sacrifice? Will they offer me myrrh and woven baskets and pictures of owls, and tell me again that my power cannot be my own?”)

It will only get worse. Sparta makes a sport of apotheosis: they did it to Hyakinthos, to Herakles, to Lykorgos the lawgiver and Lakedaimon and his eponymous wife. They did it to King Leonidas, so how could they resist his granddaughter, who towers over most men with muscles like masonry and a voice that slashes through a crowd like a thunderclap? She exists outside structure, outside law. Attempts to constrain her are met with bemusement and a cool sense that she has neither the time nor the patience. They have taken her name and written it in the stars, because what could she be if not divine?

 _Human_ , Brasidas reminds himself as he declines the cup she offers him (not quite trusting himself with wine, after the last time). She is many things, to many people: a sister, a daughter, a friend and partner. And so many things beyond that, things she has been long before he met her, none of which are _goddess_.

“Tell me about Kephallonia,” he says.

She looks at him with genuine shock, as if she never expected anyone to ask about this: a time past, a life before the divinity Sparta has yoked to her. “What?”

“Kephallonia,” he repeats.

She leans back easy and strong on her elbows. “Here I sit, with a political elite of the most powerful nation in Hellas, and he asks me about a tiny island in the west with no wealth or strategic consequence.” She tips her head back, purring laughter, the column of her throat an enthralling arch. “You are strange, Brasidas.”

 _Elite_ is a clashing word, a definition that chafes. He ignores it. “I care about more things than strategy. The place raised you, didn’t it? There must be things you remember, things you miss.”

“It’s a shithole,” she says, with a little smile that is not entirely unkind. “A barren scrap of rock with more wolves than people. Criminals, sour wine. Soil that couldn’t grow dragon’s teeth. A statue too big for it, built with money it doesn’t have.”

Then, slowly, the smile loses its warmth. “Villages erased by plague. A maze of debt and murder and extortion all over it, like a rash. A man who tried, I think, to be a father to me, but…”  

She seems to arrest herself then, shaking her head as if surfacing from a dark depth. “There were good things. Good people - or, at least, people who had not yet become bad. But most of these memories I’d give away for free.”

“And what of Sparta? Would you give those memories away, too?”

Immediately, Brasidas wishes he could take it back. The question doesn’t need asking. He knows the story, everyone does: her family sentenced by the oracle, forced to attend her brother’s killing, thrown from the sacred mountain herself by a father who preferred ritual to the lives of his children. To make her relive it would be cruelty. “No, I’m sorry - ”

“I would,” Kassandra says quietly, looking down at the street. “I would, in an instant. The life of a child means nothing to this city.”

The hurt in her. The senselessness of it, the brutality. Her life changed, destroyed, by this sharp broken thing they call home.

It overcomes him. Wrecks the barriers he’s built, the mask he wears, the great lie that gave him his position and his fame and his laurels. The vault in which Brasidas stows his grief, so carefully bricked and sealed, cracks open.

“Worse than nothing,” he says bitterly. “A child is just a body. A number, a unit of strength. What Sparta lacks in walls, she makes up for with shields - no matter the cost. It’s always been this way, _always_.”

Kassandra’s eyes snap to him as if he’s drawn a weapon.

“There’s death in everything we do,” he goes on, unable to stop it now, the rage, the stupidity of it: “We throw infants from mountains. We murder boys, and then mock them for dying. Our dances are with weapons, and our songs are about war. If our generals did not need to send each other letters, our schools would not bother teaching us to read.”

He kicks at the rim of the brazier. Embers hiss down the cliff, bursting into orange wreaths on the stone street below. “How are we meant to celebrate life and mercy when we know it will bring us shame? How can we seek peace when we know we will be erased for it?”

Kassandra’s chest is perfectly still. It feels like she hasn’t blinked in minutes. In the silence after his voice, Brasidas feels color rising in his neck, a mild shame at his outburst.

“It makes a good legend, I suppose,” he mutters. “A caution to our enemies. Never will Sparta fall, for her daughters give their lives to sustain her, and her sons die on their feet, in battle.”

“Is that how you want to die?”

There’s something accusatory in her voice. A quaver, half-swallowed. “On your feet, in battle?”

That is how Sparta would like him to die. How his mother and his trainers and his kings want him remembered. It’s the only way his headstone will bear his name - the only reminder they will have decades, centuries from now, that he existed.

But that is not what she asked.

“I want to die old,” he says. “Grey and frail, in a bed of warm furs, surrounded by people I love. I want to teach my children that honor and death are not the same. I want to have given the world something more, something better than the heads of my enemies.”

Kassandra smiles at him then - broad and beaming, her eyes peaceful - and it makes Brasidas want to take her and run. To say _no_ , we don’t need these things - this war, this blood-drenched city full of corpses waiting to die. We can vanish, the two of us who have seen through this madness, and go to a place where life can be long and dull and perfect.

\---

Summer comes again to Lakonia, a sudden wall of heat that bears down like a sweat-soaked blanket, and Brasidas learns that Kassandra hates the Hyakinthia.

He presses her on it as they walk out to the acropolis on the second day of the festival, because they are at that point in a friendship where you will discuss the most insignificant, the most banal and meaningless things, just to hear what the other person will say.

“What is there to celebrate?” She frowns at the wicker chariots thundering by, full of shouting women with their strong arms blooming with flowers. “It’s a sad story about a pointless death. Are we meant to exalt Hyakinthos for his crushed skull? Apollo for his selfishness?”

Brasidas raises his eyebrows. This seems, to him, needlessly cynical. “Selfishness? All Apollo did did was love the boy. Deeply, at that.”

“And Hyakinthos paid for it,” Kassandra says, so seriously that a chuckle ripples from him. “The gods do this, Brasidas, in all our stories. They act in their own interest, without a care for the mortal lives they touch.”

“Maybe. But the celebration is for their love, not the prince’s death.”

A breath of wind sighs through the valley. Brasidas locks his hands behind his head as they walk, closes his eyes to enjoy the respite, and is reminded: “Besides - it was Zephyros who knocked the discus off course. Apollo is not the guilty one.”

“Isn’t he?”

She’s looking away now, at the shatter of sun on the Eurotas, and there’s a distance in her eyes that makes him less eager to poke fun. “The only thing greater than the love of the immortals is the jealousy of their enemies.”

He might have replied to that, if his words were not swallowed by the roar of the acropolis as they arrive.

Within minutes, Brasidas is beset, hemmed in like a hunted stag by generals returned from the front: Makhaon with his shrewd dark eyes, boastful Alkidas sulking from fresh defeat, the navarchs Knemos and Thrasymelidas jolly and bearded with vivid new scars and breath already ripe with wine. They drag him away to the banquet table, exclaiming about formations and spycraft and the campaign they want him to lead that autumn - this and that, until his head spins with the attention.

Kassandra watches it all with a smug grin. She has always found it amusing how quickly their caper in Methone sent him tripping into celebrity. But then they come for her too, and with a weary rhythm as if tracing a well-worn path, she draws a festival official to his feet and pulls his hands away from his shielded eyes, saying: _yes, fine, I will compete, as long as you stop bowing._  

They bring her a glossy dun arravani to ride, a violent animal, heavy-boned and throwing its head in a berserk spasm. But as if this too is her nature, she quiets it - takes it by the chin, a rough control that fills its nostrils with her scent, and leans close with her hand on the cords of its neck until it calms and allows her to climb astride. 

The women of Sparta come to the gate to meet her. Their horses form a furious spine of muscle and wild rolling eyes, glossy with sweat and shifting as if whipped by the wind. They are beautiful, lined up in their billowing column with strong thighs clutching at their unruly mounts, whooping and bare-breasted (save Kassandra, who has not grown up with such customs, for which Brasidas thanks the gods) -

\- and then the shrill wail of the _salpinx_  horn _,_ and they fly.

For a moment during the third circuit, Kassandra eases on the reins to allow a woman with wild dark hair to pass her on the inner line, and Brasidas wonders if she will throw the race. If it would tempt her, even a little, to tarnish herself - to dull the shine of her godhood, so that she will no longer have to raise men to their feet in her presence.

Then, almost lazily, she pulls ahead again, and the thought goes as quickly as it came. Kassandra has never seen the need to deny herself. What others do in the face of her power is not her concern.

She pulls her horse around when she wins, meeting the crowd with a short nod, a clipped smile. Even from afar, Brasidas can see it written on her mouth:  _glad to ride, but glad it’s over -_  and another blast of the war-horn signals the games of strength.

Names are entered, mixed, drawn from a silver urn, and Brasidas's lot comes out first. He goes to the ring, and his stomach curls. 

His opponent is Lysander, a man he doesn't know - some six or eight years younger, with a starved quality behind the thickness of his farmer’s body. And the scars, the bruised cheekbones and ferocious bonfire of his eyes -

Helot-born. Struggling to lift himself up, to gain a name and escape the prison of his birth, to shield himself against the _krypteia_ and their cruel slave-hunts. And Brasidas must fight him.

He almost wants to laugh at the unfairness of it. He should yield, for this man’s future, his chance at a life beyond abuse and hard labor - but it would be a black mark on his name. In this moment, it does not matter what Brasidas has done. Lose, or decline the fight, and everything will fall away in an instant: respect, power, influence. Things he needs to fight this war, and to lift Sparta out of its masked corruption.

Kassandra hovers nearby as Brasidas removes his _chiton_ , lounging on the blanketed back of her race-winning horse with one knee crossed over the other. Here, among hundreds of eyes, a look of sympathy is all she can give him as reassurance that she knows, and does not judge.

He stretches and cracks his joints. Practices the quick shifts and turns he knows he will need against an opponent of Lysander’s build. Kassandra is not so far away that he cannot call to her: “You didn’t have this in Kephallonia, I take it?”

“I never noticed.” She gives a wry smile, and her eyes flicker to Lysander with a twinge of mourning. “Is there a purpose to this?”

A man beside her begins to explain the rules - four rounds to a match, biting and gouging not permitted, loss declared by submission, different from Olympic _pankration_ where the loser is first to the ground - but since her question was not literal, she doesn’t listen.

The first round: a moment of predatory circling and seeking opportunity, and then straight into a brutish grapple, shoulders to shoulders like deer in a struggle of antlers. Lysander’s knuckles come up against Brasidas’s ribs - _wrong, boy, too much muscle there. Your hard to their soft, didn’t they teach you this at the -_

But a helot’s son has no _agoge_.

Brasidas declines the grapple with a swift backward motion, grabbing Lysander’s wrist and hauling him forward. The man topples over his own feet, directly into the outstretched granite of Brasidas’s forearm, which catches him in the throat and puts him down instantly.

They give him a few minutes to stop coughing before the second match, and then he flies at Brasidas again, kicking desperately. They come in an onslaught, each more insistent than the last, and Brasidas bats them aside -

(Remembering Kassandra with her _xiphos_ _,_ turning his strikes like a stream splitting over a rock.)

He sets himself wide when the fourth kick comes, and catches Lysander's leg against the hard pad of his stomach. Nudging one knee under Lysander’s to remove his weight from under him, Brasidas shifts him on the fulcrum of his hips and slams him down, on his spine, in the sand.

To his credit, Lysander manages to not be knocked out cold by the impact, and grabs at Brasidas’s knee. Slipping back a step, he brings his weight back around and winds his leg around Lysander's arm, locking their joints together, twisting - and Lysander’s index finger points up madly in the dust.  

There are meant to be four rounds in a _pankration_ match. This one will not have a third.

“You were close,” Brasidas lies, extending an arm as Kassandra did to him that day at the _agoge_ \- perhaps hoping to open a channel, as she did, a thread of friendship - but Lysander smacks it away with coals of hatred in his eyes. Watching him stalk away, bracing his bruised body on the seats as the crowd thunders bloodthirsty approval, Brasidas feels not a shred of pride.

A breeze kicks up, chilling the sweat on his skin. Abruptly, he turns around to retrieve his _chiton_ from the ground -

And sees the most curious thing.

Hooded and listing low, Kassandra’s eyes slide up to meet his. Swift as a blink, but not fast enough. Her brows are too high, her lips clamping shut: an expression much too earnest to be casual. She looks for all the world like she’s been caught, detected, and _wait, just wait a fucking minute -_

Hasn’t he done that before? Doesn’t he do it every day - snatching moments, stealing glances like a thief of beauty? Taking small shy sips where he can, and feeling every time like he’s betrayed her?

For a long and empty moment, they stare at each other with a paralyzed blankness. Several things break and re-forge in his mind. Neither of them attempts to look away, because there’s no point now.

The _salpinx_ screams twice: a rupture, a thunderclap on peaceful rain. The world rushes back. Festival officials clap him on the shoulder, take his arm, and draw him away so the next contestants can mount the stage. Across the ring, Kassandra slings her leg back over her horse and rides away.

Alone now, cushioned by a clamor of screaming voices that never seems to end, Brasidas gathers his sandals and his _chiton_ and wonders, helplessly, what to do.


	7. astrapi

He mutes his smile. She cuts her laughter short.

The thread of their eyes breaks earlier now, and she releases her locks a little too quickly when they spar. Sometimes, when she approaches - softer than a sigh - she will put a hand on his shoulder blade to announce her presence, and withdraw immediately as if burnt. She has stopped spending the night curled in the furs on his floor after long days of gleeful scheming.

The distance between them is as carefully wrought and polished as a general’s panoply. Like wandering stars, or terra cotta puppets on their strings of sinew, they move in careful coordination: always close, always separate.

The name of this madness is safety, and in its own terrible, logical way, it makes perfect sense. It’s easy to feel invincible in the city, trying to break unbreakable codes and playing endless lying games with the traitor-king of Sparta, but their enemies have a hidden power here. Athens or Kosmos, it hardly matters - both work silently in the peninsula, prodding at weaknesses, smoking out the centers of Sparta’s strength in a vain effort to weaken its warmaking architecture.

The ghost of a touch on his arm, gone instantly. A smile that hides a bitter disappointment. He nods, to show that he understands.

When you are a load-bearing beam, distractions are a good way to die.

\---

The ephors send him north to the Gulf of Korinthia, where Knemos the navarch has lost forty-seven ships.

It would be difficult, Brasidas thinks during the long journey, to outshine Spartan incompetence at sea. Their ships are crude, their oarsmen clumsy. They are slow to turn, slow to flank; their prows are dull, and their marines too proud for archery. Like boxers facing peltasts, their only hope of victory is close the distance as quickly as possible - to leap through the great wooden ribs of their enemies and feast on the rowers and soldiers within.

But no one has thought of this. In fact, when Brasidas arrives, no one is doing anything at all.

“Six fucking days?”

He gapes at Knemos, grey and bearded in his scarred armor, less jolly now than he was at the Hyakinthia a month ago. “Six days you have been sitting here, glaring at each other across the strait, while Athenian reinforcements sail up the coast?”

Knemos looks like he cannot decide between shame and rage. Brasidas speaks quickly, before he loses the floor, or before the old general can have him thrown out:

“Charge through the narrows. You have thrice the ships, and this is water we know. Your spies say the port of Naupaktos is ungarrisoned - so threaten it! Draw Athens into the gulf, into constrained waters, where they cannot make fools of you.”

The old navarch’s fists are tight. His face blooms red with fury, and for a sinking moment Brasidas wonders if he has just struck the killing blow on his own military career - but in the end, even all of Knemos’s bruised animosity cannot deny a good plan.

The battle is immediate, and brutally quick. In the morning, they raise their sails - the better to be spotted by watchmen perched atop Athenian masts - and move boldly along the southern coast of the gulf, a clutch of crimson like blood in the water. Seeing hungry spears pointed towards their land, their unprotected base, the Athenian fleet matches them - snaking single-file around that jutting point of rock as if hoping to steal through the narrows in secret.

A fragile herd. A timid chain of blue beads begging to be snapped.

Sparta leaps.

Sails puff and fold in the listing sun, pinwheeling madly, grabbing at the wind. The navarchs bellow orders, and their oarsmen burn with exhaustion. White-knuckled, salt-spray like needles in his eyes, Brasidas clutches at the prow of Knemos’s vanguard ship on legs that prefer the land, and watches in wonder as the sea churns and screams around them.

The neat line of triremes is cleaved in half. Eleven Athenian ships slip through the assault and speed for Naupaktos, and the rest of them stall in open water, circumscribed by fifty-seven small Spartan predators.

Arrogance will ruin this, Brasidas cautions. They must run the ships aground and face Athens on the shore, as he did in Methone, so that Sparta may do its best work. The message is delivered through shouts and blasts of the war-horn, through signals made on decks with weapons and shields - and nine Athenian boats are beached, swarmed, and devoured.

The waves settle. The moon rises on red foam. A report of the day’s progress goes back to the city, and Brasidas goes with it.

The memory is sharp as the sea in his eyes. Knemos’s tight smile, his stiff nod as he claps Brasidas on the shoulder and pointedly wishes him a safe journey home. Brasidas understands the maneuver, though he would prefer not to: now that the hard work, the opening gambit, is done, the navarch must do what he can to salvage his reputation from the charred bones of his lost ships. It’s a barefaced tactic, a greedy tug at a crumb of glory that Brasidas would just as soon give away.

Not worth the thought. He rides home - away from the great stinging prows of war, towards the promise of honey eyes and lips drawn in affection, laughing together at these big empty men and their sicknesses of pride.

Kassandra finds him the night he returns, regular as the path of the sun - but when he tells her why he is back so soon, she does not laugh.

“Take care with your skill,” she says, her brow furrowed. “Our people are not given to humility. I hope the general you made a fool of has a sense of humor.”

Brasidas goes back to that moment on the deck of Sparta’s vanguard ship, looking at Knemos’s red face and balled fists, thinking:  _if I were punished for this, would I grieve?_ _If I were stripped of my title and made again into a simple citizen, would that be such a curse?_   

“I am no threat to Knemos,” he says. “He would have come to the same idea. It took a fresh eye; that’s all.”

She laughs then, with something too close to pride. “Maybe. Or maybe it took you, and not him. Is it so hard for you to believe that you are gifted in war?”

And then she quiets, almost apologetically, because she knows he would rather be gifted in practically anything else.

“You were in Elis when I left for the gulf,” he says, eager to change the subject. “What did you find?”

“An agent of Kosmos, posing as an Olympic judge. Ruling with laurels and poisons, tipping favor to one region or the other.” She winds the unsolved _skytale_ in her fingers, as she likes to do when her hands are idle, and flashes him a secret smile. “I have played your wrestling game, now. I think I like it.”

He barely has time to imagine this properly before a long and noisy barrage of knocking brings him to his door.

A helot, pale and sweating, informs him that the kings have called an emergency war council. Attendance is required for ephors, councilmembers, generals, and any military advisors garrisoned within the city -

"And her, too," the man says, gesturing over his shoulder into his apartment, where Kassandra makes a choked noise in her throat and looks up in disbelief.

Nearly a year in Sparta, and the kings have never invited her to the palace. There has never been a meeting she has attended in peace, never a council or audience that she has not had to bully her way into. Something is wrong.

\---

“That’s not possible.”

His own voice sounds distant and hollow. He looks between Sparta’s elite, drawn faces with gaunt shadows that have no answers for him: “When I left, we had split the Athenian fleet. Half their ships were aground, destroyed. We outnumbered them five-fold. How could we have lost?”

As the messenger makes his report, Brasidas comes back to the sea and the sound of waves and the sickly wobble of the deck under his feet, and sees:

Athenian triremes sailing out from the harbor, doomed and dignified - eleven on fifty-seven, the port of Naupaktos standing frail and ripe behind them. The corpses of their nine sibling ships bake on the beach, disemboweled, their innards scattered around them in a patchwork of shields and oars and dead sons.

Red sails bear down. The salt air carries a _paean_ : a full-bodied song of triumph, sung too soon. That typical Spartan arrogance, old as earth.

The Athenian navarch performs a feat of madness, canting his trireme tight as a clenched fist around the fulcrum of a merchant ship anchored in deep water. A Spartan ship shatters against its sharp beaked prow, a storm of blood and splinters and eye-painted hull-wood. Beside them, their fleetmates stand frozen in shock with their oars dropped and their weapons slack.

Then the chaos. The relentless approach of the Athenian eleven, invigorated by their captain’s genius, as the Spartan fleet scatters and lists, void of direction. As the ships rut against each other in the cacophony of retreat, a lone man leaps from an Athenian deck and surges across the gap - a distance no mortal could cross - and boards them.

He has dark hair and honey eyes and ruddy brown skin. His arms are bare, and his armor blinding. He is tall and graceful, moving in livid silence, leaping from soldier to soldier like a mountain cat and spitting them on his sword easy as gutting heifers for the altar.

The messenger coughs, breaking the spell he has cast over the room. The carnage, he says, frightened old Knemos so badly that he drove his fleet into a reef in panic.

The palace is silent.

This is the secret of Athens, the generals begin to rumble: a soldier who fights with the fury of a titan, who moves with a speed difficult for mortal eyes to comprehend. They say he appears on the field like a brush-fire or strike of lightning, slaughtering entire phalanxes and sowing discord before vanishing again into the dust.

He is called Deimos, the terror. Named for a snaking dread that comes in battle - that cold and certain fear that you are about to die.

As he listens, Brasidas counts Kassandra’s tics. Mouth studiously neutral, dimpled from chewing her cheek, quietly destroying her cuticles behind her back. A year ago, he would have thought her merely focused; now, he knows that inside her head there is a sound like the strained howl of a war-horn.

She looks directly at him.

 _Safety_ , he thinks, but there is something arresting in her eyes - something he has never seen before - that makes it impossible to look away.

When the council is done, Kassandra walks beside him in silence. Then, after they have gone some way from the palace, she pulls him aside and seizes his arm.

His bicep dents beneath her fingertips. Her nails dig into his skin, half-moon marks deep enough to bleed. The aggression of it takes him by surprise; she has not been rough before.

“Stay away from him,” she says, in a voice made of danger.

“Who is he?"

“It doesn’t matter.”

“How can I stay away from a man I don’t know?”

It slashes down quick as a sword-stroke: “You will know him.”

Her words hang in the air like wet fog. Both of them know that what she’s asked is not possible. Her chest rises slow and deep, a forced calm. Her grip on his arm is tight and close and painful.

“If you hear him, if you see him,” she breathes, “turn around. Throw down your shield and run. Leave your brothers in their blood, if you must. So long as you get away.”

“I’m not fool enough to seek out a titan in battle,” Brasidas says, slowly, “but if Deimos fights for Athens, you know I can't ignore him.”

“No,” she snaps with a furious heat in her eyes, something almost like panic. For the first time, he can see a shred of divinity in her - the blunt refusal of the gods to accept a mortal’s will. “This is not something you decide. This is not something your cleverness can overcome, or your valor. This responsibility is mine - _mine_.”

Then, with a halting hesitation: “If Deimos knows we are - ”

Several lifetimes seem to pass while Brasidas waits for her to pick a word.

“If he knows we are friends,” Kassandra says slowly, “then he will make himself your enemy.”

\---

It takes time, but Brasidas is patient and curious. Starting from a place of knowledge helps: it doesn’t take a savant to know that the weapon of Athens is the infant meant to die at the foot of Taygetos twenty years ago. He is the second child of the Wolf, the old general’s forgotten son. A boy with a cursed future who, in becoming a tool of Kosmos, has fulfilled his own unlucky prophecy.

But then, such is the nature of all prophecies. To fight them is only to tighten them around your neck.

It is past midnight on their rocky hill near Athena’s temple when he finally coaxes it from her.

“Alexios,” Kassandra says, carefully, as if the name can be broken. “He was Alexios, when I knew him.”

Brasidas frowns. “Do you not know him now?”

“I have seen him. I have spoken to him.” Her voice is steady, but the war-horns in her heart are clear as bells. “But no, I do not know him. We are strangers now.”

He thinks of her warning outside the palace, remembers the stinging press of her fingertips on his arm. “Strangers do not make enemies of each other’s friends. I think there is more to tell.”

Kassandra gives a humorless laugh, eyes squeezed shut - frustrated and comforted at his perception, as she always has been. _Eyes like Odysseus_ , she told him once, _another skill you should exercise in caution._

“I met him years ago," she says, "on an island east of Athens. A lonely place - unsettled, but for wolves and pirates.” She looks down at her hands, as if they are part of the memory. “He tracked me there. He wanted to talk. He did not doubt we were family.”

She goes quiet, and Brasidas does not fill the silence. There is no need to rush her. Across the valley, hearths and oil-lamps go dark, like stars snuffed by thunderclouds, and finally, she continues, as if she had never stopped:

“He told me what he does for Kosmos, and why. Or, I should say, he tried to tell me. There was no real meaning in what he said, none that I could decipher. It was the babbling of a mind arrested in childhood. The threads of cause and reason and logic that we think normal - they were not in him, because they were taken away.”

The rough-sketched lines of Deimos begin to fill with color in Brasidas’s mind. He sees the skin behind that shining breastplate and a face that looks like Kassandra’s, stretched thin over a life of pain and spears and shattered bones. Not child or man or beast, but some half-transformed monstrosity that lashes out because it knows nothing else.

 _How did this happen?_ he wants to ask. _What did they do to him? What horrors could have made such a creature_ \- but this is Kassandra’s story.

“He tried to pull me to him,” she goes on hollowly, “to compare us. To draw us in parallel. I think he meant to reunite us, in his way. To say: look, sister, we are the same - in our divinity, in our damaged hearts and bloodthirst. But then - ”

She has to stop for a long, broken breath. “Then, he realized that I am not like him. I do not claim godhood, nor do I much like the taste of blood. All I wanted was to find my mother.”

Her hands are twisted in themselves. A terrible guilt gashes her through as a hull pierces the waves - not for a thing she has done, but for a thing she has survived. He has seen it before, in boys returned from failed campaigns, men who have dropped their shields to run and been haunted for all their nights by the wet cries of their dying brothers.

“My life has not been easy,” she says, “but it has been easier than his. My heart is whole. The damage done to it was shallow enough to heal. I think he hates me for that.”

“Envies you, maybe,” Brasidas says. “Envy and hatred are not the same.”

“Either is justified. We are the same blood, and yet only he was torn to shreds so the pieces could be made into knives. Why should I be allowed peace, or family, or love, if he will never have them?”

“Who says he will never have those things? All you know of him is a brief conversation on a deserted island. There is no reason he cannot come back from that edge.”

Kassandra looks sidelong at him. Her eyes are hooded, iced over. She has had this argument before.

“You sound like my mother,” she says darkly. “She wants our family mended. She wants what was taken from her restored: her simple life, her happy children, as if nothing has happened at all.”

“What do _you_ want?”

A flash of something across her face - quick as her speartip, and just as quickly hidden behind her back. He wonders when she will stop being surprised when he asks her what she thinks.

“I don't want to bring him home.”

She says it so quietly that Brasidas has to lean closer, and it occurs to him that he is about to hear a secret that even Myrrine can never know. A chill at first, and then a surging warmth as he remembers: _this is what trust is._

“I want to find him,” she whispers. “I want to kill him, so he cannot continue this hurt. I want it to be over: his pain, and my mother’s, and mine.”

Her hands are shaking, and without thinking, Brasidas takes them. She breathes raggedly, and it all comes out in a rush: “No one would survive what he did. He was tormented, abused - there are decades of traumas scratched into his flesh, a conditioning that will always drive him, no matter how far from Kosmos I take him. I fear there is a seed of evil in him, and it will never come out."

“Your brother can be saved.”

Kassandra looks at him sharply. Her eyes are afire with so many things - _how dare you_ and _you have no idea_ and _you know nothing of him_ \- but behind all that disbelief and outrage, a savage edge of hope.

“He is your blood,” Brasidas says, “and I know that if this had happened to you - if there were a seed of evil in you - you would find it. You would pry it out with your bare hands, and heal, and become what you are now.”

“Which is what?”

She asks it almost hopelessly, and Brasidas wants to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, because how can she not know?

“A mountain,” he says. “Steady and strong and honest. A bright star that bends to nothing, and no one.”

The fire snaps beside them in its brazier, the only sound in the night. He keeps her hands in his, pressing on her knuckles and her palms until he can feel the tremors subside. Slowly, the roll of her breath comes back, that easy rise and fall of strength in her shoulders. In the silence, he idly thinks about the great many things he would do for her: sail from Troy to Ithaka, walk barefoot the forge of Hephaistos, brave the cold grabbing souls of the underworld, fight a thousand angry god-brothers.

After some minutes or hours or years, Kassandra lifts her hand and touches her fingertips to those scabbed-over crescent marks on his arm, where she lost herself and allowed her fear to spill into him.

“I’m sorry for this,” she says quietly. “There is no excuse. If I were as steady as you say, I would have caught myself.”

“Banish the thought. It will hardly be my most impressive scar.”

“I know.” She chuckles then, and her teeth glint in a playful grin, jarring against the wetness that has not yet left her eyes. “I’ve seen the others.”

The others are not visible in armor, or even a _chiton_. Every scar suddenly seems to ache, burning with the memory of her eyes on him at the Hyakinthia.

“On your ribs,” she says, “it looked like a lion’s claw.”

So easy, this veer into the mundane. As if they have not just been speaking of dark fears and fratricide. “Nothing so exotic. It was the rake of fingernails - a price I paid for carelessness during my spying in Boeotia.”

“I see.” There’s a distant, dreamy quality to her expression. “And on your hip - the gash looked like it cut to the bone.”

“It did. A battle long ago, on the fields of Megaris. I am lucky to walk.”

She nods, and then reaches for his face, and he knows she means the slash on his cheekbone, a young scar framing his eye like warpaint.

Her fingers stop just shy, curling with hesitation. Unthinking, his hand comes up to cover hers, palm over knuckles, and finishes the motion - bringing her hand to his cheek, where it settles with a jolting certainty. A shudder seems to go through her, from her throat down to her ankles.

Her thumb sketches the scar. There’s weight behind it, different from the ghost of an accidental touch, the sterile camaraderie of a handshake or shoulder-clap. He leans into it - the perfect cup of her hand, that warm and steady support. It is like resting, at last.

“This one?” she murmurs.

He has the answer in his mind, but it doesn’t seem important. His hand moves along her arm, down her torso, settles on the hard curve of her hip. Brazenly, they look into each other, like mortals staring at the sun.

 _Who is watching?_ he wonders absently, but the thought seems far away. _Are the traitor-king’s eyes here, his ears? Seeing, scheming, drawing lines of dependency, of potential hurt -_

She leans forward, soft and quick and sure, and kisses him.

It’s just a touch, light and experimental - a rush of breath from her mouth to his, sweet with dates and honey. His stomach is knotted. His skin prickles against the wind.

Then her hand slides to the back of his neck, and he’s pulling her closer, and she does it again, and he feels as though he might forget his own name.

He is both surprised, and not surprised at all. There was no warning: no heart-stopping mission or threat of death, no harrowing circumstance or wine to make them bold. It’s the easiest, most natural thing. A mutual agreement, written in their movements and words that don't need saying:

Fuck safety. Fuck logic and foresight, this draining vigilance against a foe that is at once everywhere and nowhere. Let them come, for a life without this one mistake is not worth the struggle.

Brasidas remembers hating the _chiton_ last summer, fresh from war and longing for the security of leather and metal. Today, he is thankful for the looseness of the fabric and the easy pull of the knot.


	8. pyra

She has a climber’s body.

Long, taut. Compact in the shoulders and back, where her weight hangs in her daily exercises - but there’s something of a diver in her too, strong thighs and a core solid as olivewood. Dense muscle moves under her skin like sun-glitter on the sea. The spidery fractal of sinew around her ribs passes rough under his fingers as he searches for every ridge, every pleat, every crease and knot and startling softness.

There are too many marvels here to name. Her skin like a forge, throwing sparks at his touch. The catch of her breath in her pleasure, in his. With eyes full of wonder, she moves her hands along him, exploring him, charting his body like a zealous astronomer under a deep new sky - a thing he’s spent so long imagining that he can hardly believe it happened at all.

“That _what_ happened?” Kassandra asks the day after with her brow delicately creased, and waits for the stammer before laughing richly, winding her fist in his _chiton_ , and pressing a smile to his mouth.

All the time, he thinks of it. Of her.

He thinks of her on him, of her rough voice and her hair undone. The weight of her, pinning him; the crush of her thighs on his hips. That long curving throat he’s loved in silence, bare and pulsing beneath his lips.

Her hands on his chest, his shoulders, his jaw. Her eyes of boiling gold, looking at him like he’s something precious. He presses himself to her, drinking her breath and sounds as they move, that first kiss a chaste and distant memory.

He thinks of stone beneath his knees in an alley in Pitana, near the olive tree where they made their first alliance, and of the charge in the air that night - a fever of secrecy and rushing blood. It flashes through him, a vivid sense memory: her fist wound in his hair, her back pressed to brick and mud as she bucks into his tongue. The noises through her fingers, the needy thrash as it builds in her, and the seize of her stomach when she peaks - wave after wave, destructive, luxurious.

He thinks of her in the tangle of his sheets. Flipping her over, the thrill in her eyes and breath at control stripped away. The furrow of her back under his palm as he pulls her into that perfect arch, straining for a closeness not possible. The shock of heat, of tightness, pushing into her like coming home.

His name in her voice - hissed, groaned, gasped. Brasidas,  _Brasidas -_

Not for the first time, he has to excuse himself from war council. His skin is hot, his clothes stifling. It is unbecoming of a Spartan to flee, but he needs air, and space, and a place safe from the searching eyes of his peers. He knows what some of them will mutter when he is gone - _addled, ridiculous, like a boy who’s just discovered his cock_ \- but this is better than letting them see how large the gaps in his armor have grown.

\---

The greatest pleasures, Brasidas thinks, come after: when they are slaked and tired, and can do nothing but laugh and sigh and lie knotted against each other in a bloom of sweat and ease.

They will talk of anything, everything. Her dreams, his family. Her father’s adopted son, Stentor (a little shit, she says with affection, and deserving of his name), and how Brasidas once dreamt of woodwork and blacksmithing _._ He tells her of what he’s seen in the north, in Malis and Makedonia where they drink their wine unmixed and fight with pikes as tall as three men, and Kassandra tells him of Athens, of its sharp minds and ornate robes and the deep growing rot those things conceal.

Sometimes, in the dawnlight or coral-pink afternoon or silver of the moon through his window, she will put her ear to his chest and listen to his heart.

“I could dance to this,” she says, and he can hear the smile in her voice.

His mind runs from him at times like these, free and unruly in the dark, saying: my life has tricked me into thinking I was happy before this.

It’s a young, foolish thought. Of course he was happy, and she too, both of them whole and in no need of fixing. But it feels true at this moment, so he allows it to himself - holding it in his arms as a child holds the legend of his favorite god-touched hero - and follows the narcotic whisper of her breathing into sleep.

Morning comes with skin warm and flushed, limbs tangled like wrestlers in joint-lock. As always, Kassandra is up with the dawn, waking him slowly with her lips and her tongue and the gentle roaming of her hands.

\---

They agree it should remain a secret, for all the old reasons. And child’s play, for two trained spies: the hardest part was keeping it from each other. Although Brasidas’s frequent absences and abrupt departures from the war table have given him something of a rakish reputation, promiscuity alone is no danger to a rising officer, and there is no sign that the generals and navarchs know it is Kassandra who has claimed him.

“I think they’re pretending,” she says one night, her smile laced with pride. “I think they know everything. I think they’re afraid that if they make trouble, you will go to their camps and do what you did to old Knemos, and all of Sparta will see them for what they are.”

Brasidas has still not learned to take a compliment, so he laughs and draws her down to him and lets it pass like the warm breeze through his window.

But Kassandra has never spoken a careless word. Hearing it from her makes him realize that he has become something of a specter to the military elite. Though he leads defenses often enough, and many of his proposals during war council are speedily turned into plans and shipped to the front in Attika by runner and code, his primary role in the army seems to be _contingency plan_.

The new gossip says: it’s easy to be a general of Sparta. If you fuck up, they will send Brasidas to clean up your mess.

His next assignment comes in the golden days between summer and autumn, a quick and quiet shift dappled with wildflowers and the beginnings of rain. They will deploy him deep north into the Ionian sea with a fleet of relief-ships (more boats, more navarchs, more fucking _water,_ because his poor stupid people refuse to learn), where an island called Korkyra is about to tear itself in two.

He tries to maintain a healthy detachment from the politics of it all. He is a weapon, after all, not the arm that holds it. But the circuits of money and influence and loyalty that lie underneath a nation’s words and gestures have always fascinated him, and on Korkyra that tapestry is rich as an overgrown trellis. Nominally, the island is an Athenian holding, rife with populists taken with the shine and promise of democracy - but in secret, a cadre of self-styled revolutionaries has begun to rail against the their governors and trade partners, calling them slavers and tyrants and loudly petitioning for Spartan aid.

How deep do their motivations run, Brasidas wonders - and how far afield from the ideals and moral imperatives they show to the world? Do the populists believe in the vote, or have they simply grown accustomed to the good lives given by Athenian trade? Are the Spartan sympathizers truly revolutionaries, or wealthy oligarchs grasping for fragments of power that democracy might steal from them?

After the briefing, Pausanias pulls him aside and tells him his true purpose: the navarch entrusted with the region has proven himself an idiot, and needs rescuing. Alkidas is famous for many things - a big voice, bluster to rival Apollo - but strategic acumen is not among them.

It wouldn’t make sense for Kassandra to come along. The secret still needs keeping, after all, and a Spartan warship is too small and too public for stowaways. Deimos was last sighted days ago on the plains of Attika, so there’s no risk of repeating the disaster at Naupaktos. And besides, there’s work for her on the mainland - an exciting new lead on a Kosmos-linked ring of financiers and speculators that stoke the war with slaves and copper, feeding on the blood and debts drawn by their weapons. He tells it to himself as much as to her.

Kassandra smiles and touches his collarbone and makes him late to the boarding.

Their flock of red-sailed relief-ships rounds the white beaches of Methone, the jutting green-brushed horn of Katakolo, the rocky shores of Ithaka where sly Odysseus was once laid sleeping beside a galley's worth of gleaming Phaeakian gifts. The Ionian is rough and cold in the north, green glass waves sliced on Peloponnesian hulls like soft dagger-cut flesh. Brasidas gains what he thinks are sea legs, and then loses his stomach over the starboard rail (to the whooping joy of his shipmates) and learns that he will never truly enjoy the ocean. They sleep in shifts on the naked deck, wrapped in their cloaks and shivering under the stars.

He thinks of Kassandra on the mainland. Weapons at her waist, asking her curious pointed questions, wearing her power like a racer's dress. The pang of leaving is still fresh, threatening his composure like wine trembling at the edge of a cup -

But no, Brasidas thinks, his hands pillowed behind his head in the dark salt air where nothing can save him from his own mind. That pang is a blessing - the emptying suck of the tide before it rushes back in to chase the gulls. If there is pain now, then there will be something equal and opposite when he sees her again.

Another dark thought paces him like a stalking wolf, quiet and skull-faced. However perfect the reunion, however sweet her skin and lips and their stolen hours together, at the end of it is another touch to his collarbone and kiss goodbye. All of it, a swift stumbling downhill run towards the day one of them returns to Sparta and cannot find the other.

When they finally put into the pier of Korkyra, barrel-chested Alkidas just about knocks Brasidas over with a flurry of shouts and a powerful one-armed embrace.

He’s taken aback - and impressed, when he thinks about it. When a man comes to question your worth, you can do one of two things: rant and fume and be called a fool when he solves your problems, or welcome him like a friend and equal, and have the work remembered not as a salvage operation but as a hard-fought partnership. For this calculation, Alkidas has more of his respect than Knemos ever did.

There is hardly any struggle. The Korkyraen fleet is slow and disorganized, ruptured from civil war, and crumples under them like leaves in a spring river. The real intrigue - the challenge and upset he has been waiting for - happens after the victory, when Brasidas suggests they attack Athens.

Alkidas and his advisors look at him as if he has begun to foam at the mouth. Politely, they ask: has he gone mad?

“No,” Brasidas says -

 _\-  no_ , Kassandra echoes in his memory, grappling him to her with whipcord calves and the cross of her ankles, _inside._

Focus. Think of tactics, of mathematics and siege architecture. He clenches his fists behind his back and continues: “All of Demosthenes’s fleet sails south, around the peninsula, to take back Korkyra - true? Then who guards the port of Piraeus?”

No one answers. They have always hated his rhetorical questions.  

“Take the fleet over the isthmus of Korinth,” he says. “Use the _diolkos_ , that long paved track merchants use to drag their ships. Athens will not know: those are Spartan lands, protected by Spartan camps. From there, Piraeus is barely a day’s sail. While Demosthenes flounders half a world away, blind and deaf, we will be inside the Long Wall - on foot, where we excel, burning Athenian trade ships and striking at the heart of the _polis_.”

They look at each other, silent and thrilled and bewildered by this madman’s gambit, a thing no one has done or would ever do. Murmurs are exchanged, pawns nudged and manipulated on their makeshift war table. There is no real rebuttal, no passionate counterclaim or deconstruction of the idea - just a soft shake of the head from Alkidas, and that’s the end of it.

Brasidas is disappointed, but not surprised. His plan would destroy the Athenian supply line. The city would starve and surrender. The war would end. He knows this with the surety of a vision, a prophecy - but his superiors will not make the gamble.

He is ever the weapon, never the arm, and the weapon has done its part.

\---

Brasidas remembers lying on the lonely deck of his relief-ship and speculating what it might feel like to see her again.

Sunrise. Fresh rain. Battle-frenzy. A deep belly-laugh, or a spinning blue-lotus high. The crush of a wave coming back from low tide, dense and hard, knocking the breath from him like a body blow from a sledgehammer.

He should have known it would be like none of those. So many things about Kassandra are without compare.

She smells of iron and sweat and victory. Her mouth is pressed to his shoulder; her weapons are battered and worn and digging into his flank. “You’re here,” she breathes, flushed and alive in his arms, “gods take me, _fuck_ , you’re here,” and he knows by her thick voice and the hammer of her heart that she has also had dark pacing thoughts of coming back to an epitaph instead of warm skin.

But those fears have no place lying between them, and he feels a sudden urge to banish them, to stop them at the threshold and say _no -_ this time we have come back, and we have found each other, and that is all that matters.

He takes her face in his hands. Kisses her, relentlessly, with all the heat and hunger that has thrashed in him like a caged catamount during his weeks at sea. He feels the fear drain away, and the fever take its place.

The map of her unfolds again with its cliffs and valleys and deep shadows. Her voice lilts like a bard’s as she sketches her exploits for him in turns of joy and disgust and regret, and at night they trace paths across each other’s limbs that Brasidas hopes will never become old. He kisses the soft smooth marks on her stomach and hips where she’s grown into her strength, and catalogues her scars, the atlas of her triumphs - one here, on her spine, one here on the curve of her rib, two side by side on the inside of her thigh…

Kassandra looks at him lazily in the dusty sun, body drawn in amber. Her fingers trace idle circles on his stomach. There’s a curve on her scarred lips that still, after all this, ties him in knots.

There is so much more to know. So much to learn. It spins his head and makes him smile a stupid, giddy smile. He runs his palm over the thickness of her forearm, her slender wrist, the wide strong bones of her knuckles -

Oh.

He traces her arm again, to be sure. Wide, narrow, wide -

“The _skytale_ ,” he says, lurchingly, sitting up and jarring her hand away, “where is it?”

The haze clears from her eyes - instantly, like a signal-fire set ablaze. Her brow furrows. That old sharp curiosity is back, and Brasidas suddenly remembers waking to her exercises all those months ago, back when he had to keep his eyes to himself.

“I’ll get it,” she says, and vanishes into the shadows of his apartment.

When Kassandra returns and crouches beside him, he takes the _skytale_ in one hand - delicately, for the parchment has all but flaked apart from age and moisture - and her arm in the other. Slowly, he wraps it: spooling it down her forearm, towards the taper of her wrist, back up her hand until it terminates at her knuckles, and like witchcraft the words appear - apple, mother, ram, fortune, harbor, _lagos_ -

She looks at him with undisguised wonder. The key is a woman’s arm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Holidays! <3


	9. philos

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the short update! fun fact I originally thought I could get the whole arkadia arc done in one chapter. haha :upside-down-smile:

It takes a moment's hectic coordination to retrieve the proper tools: quill, ink, parchment, palimpsest. Twice, the fragile ribbon of papyros nearly comes to pieces in their hands, and Kassandra knocks over an inkpot in excitement, but at last they land back on the floor of the apartment surrounded by paper, the yellow loops of the _skytale_ draped over her like nautical ropes.

It’s not a perfect process. The spy lurking in his war tent all those months ago was built for assassination, leaner in the arms and hands (unbidden, it comes back to him with a scent of salt and iron: sword sliding in, up, along the breastbone, like a butcher quartering a calf), and some of the wraps take readjusting and imagination. They work in restless silence, punctuated by the odd breathless giggle or noise of indignation, free hands scribing on scraps of sheepskin while they hold and align the fraying coils against Kassandra’s trembling muscles.

Finally, with the junk words removed and the remainder parceled out as sensibly as possible, it reads:

LAGOS OF ARKADIA NEEDS REMINDING

PHILONOE & NILOXENOS TO PRESS

KEEP SWEET GRAIN FLOWING TO ATTIKA

ALL GLORY TO KOSMOS

Kassandra sits back. Fragments of parchment lie like broken pottery at her feet. A pregnant silence hangs between them.

“All that, for this?” She looks at the words - half in his handwriting and half in hers, like square stamps next to birdscratch - as if to will meaning from them. “Well, it’s not _nothing_ , I suppose. A place to start, and names I haven’t heard, even in Achaia. And at least it’s proof of - what? Brasidas, what is it?”

Brasidas is decades away, his ears and fingers burning with cold in the winter foothills of Taygetos.

A fresh kill freezes at his feet, its guts exhaling clouds of steam and stink into the air. A brutal wind snaps his cloak; there is snow in his hair, his eyes, the stiff folds of his clothes. Around him, a copse of scrawny boys clusters with eyes like great hungry moons, muttering and shifting, keening forward with the words of their trainers in their ears: _prove you are worth your name. Come back alive, by whatever means. Steal your survival from the others if necessary_ -

At his side, pressed flank to flank, dagger drawn in shaky defiance: Lagos.

Kind, quiet, light-eyed Lagos, whose voice broke at killing, whose hands bled and shivered against the reeds. Who drew up his chest in tearful resolution when Brasidas was beaten for sharing his ration, and stole his survival from no one.

Lagos, who was built for thought and not war. Who needed protecting not because he was weak, but because he was better.

“I know him,” Brasidas says. Kassandra’s hands are on him - one on his arm, one on his jaw, a soothing weight. “I know him, and he’s not with them. It’s not possible.”

But anything is possible. He knows it sure as the shine of fear in Kassandra’s eyes, carrying that bitter image of her brother with his shattered snarling mind. Sure as the traitor-king sitting behind his mask in the palace of Sparta, his every breath a deep steady bellows into the hearth of war.

\---

He spends the afternoon telling her of Lagos. How he talked and laughed - so quietly you might think he was shivering - and how he would bring water to the _agoge_ ’s helots when the trainers turned their backs. How casually he spoke of the world he wanted, where you could be a scribe or a lawmaker and still be thought a man, and where a mother like his would not have to send her son away with a shield he could not carry.

And then there were the arguments with the other boys at daily mess, bread thrown and wine spilled, and the first of many failed helot-hunts - a fortnight spent in hiding with stolen mead and righteous malcontent. This and that, memories as tattered and plentiful as the remains of the _skytale_ at their feet.

When he is done, Brasidas finds himself looking at Kassandra with his hands outstretched in a gesture of welcome, as if to say: _so, as you can see, there is no way my dear friend Lagos could be an agent of Kosmos._

“Your Lagos sounds like a good man,” she says with a smile, with crushing sincerity. “It would honor me to meet him.” Then, gently: “It could mean anything. _Needs reminding_ \- it could be anything at all. It's willfully vague, as is their way.”

Brasidas nods, not quite trusting his voice.

“When did Lagos become archon of Arkadia?” she presses. “And how, if he is Spartan-born and Arkadia merely an allied state?”

Good - this, he can do. Facts, politics. Things that have nothing to do with memories of soft eyes and decency.

“It’s not a true alliance,” he croaks, realizing that his throat is parched with talking, and nods thanks as Kassandra leans over to hand him a lambskin of water from the bedside. “Arkadia is independent in name only. In return for protection, they accept Spartan regency and sovereignty over their trade - grain and figs, mostly, a steady supply for our war-camps in Attika. As for how Lagos came to the position…“

A dozen more stories there, bubbling like well-water from flooded earth. He drinks from the lambskin and swallows them down. “Towards the end of our schooling, he took care to show our trainers that his talents lay in logistics and administration. That he was better suited to the quill than the shield.”

Memory curls his lip, brings a long-forgotten loathing to his gut like bile. “Soft-bellied Lagos, they called him. Yellow Lagos, Lagos the rabbit-heart. He wanted to improve the world, to feed the hungry, and they ridiculed him for it. It got him what he wanted, in the end - a government office, far from the warfront - but - ”

Kassandra takes his hand and pulls it into her lap, quick as a heron snatching a fish. _I know._

“I would be different,” Brasidas says hollowly, “if not for him. I might have gone to the _krypteia._ ”

She sucks in a sharp breath. Slave-killers. The best of Sparta's boy soldiers, plucked young from their schoolmates, whittled to a cruel point and turned inward. You see a _kryptes_ rarely, if at all, and only during the night - they roam the alleys and foothills, hidden and lurking, clothed in rags and knives and showing their teeth through bloodied grinning skull-smiles.

“They came for me when we were nineteen.” He looks down at the join of their fingers, thinking: I am the only man in Sparta who can say these things out loud. Trying _not_ to think: where would these thoughts go, if not to her? “Lagos knew how to hide from the trainers; he’d been doing it for years. He didn’t care that we’d be punished, or that they might take me anyway. He remembered how I protected him when we were young, and wanted to return the favor.”

Perhaps sensing a sort of madness building in him - _no, the man who made me what I am cannot be evil, cannot_ \- Kassandra draws his hand up towards her and holds it firm against her chest.

“Then the first thing I will do, when I see him,” she says, honey eyes warm and serene and utterly honest, “is thank him.”

Brasidas splays his fingers on her bare skin. Closes his eyes, breathes through his teeth. Presses down into flesh and muscle until he can feel the faint tattoo of her heart against her ribs, and allows it to calm him.

“I have to go to Arkadia,” he says, and before he can ask _will you come?_ she’s on her feet, pulling him after her and making plans.

“We'll need to approach quietly.” She flickers about the room, collecting her tunic and armor and sandals, splashing her face and neck with water from the washbasin in the corner. “Kosmos will watch, as they always do, and try to shield him from us. I worked with a woman in Achaia who might have information - and I know my mother has kept busy making contacts in the north. Will you go in secret?” she asks, turning to him, “Or petition the kings?”

“Petition,” he says after a moment’s calculation. “We’ll be gone long enough for them to notice my absence. Better to have our play in the open than risk my relationship with the other king. Here, come here - ”

Kassandra smiles and tilts her body away and holds her hair aside, and he spends a few silent breaths working at the buckles and leather cords of her breastplate. When he’s finished, he turns her around, holding her shoulders - those hard warm shoulders, iron under flower-velvet - and kisses her.

She sighs into it. Sinks against him. The bronze curves of her armor press cold and sharp against his skin.

“We have to be careful,” she breathes on bruised lips. “Those orders were from last winter, and Kosmos does not idle. That spy did not live long enough to do her job, but we can be sure someone else did.”

\---

Brasidas waits for nightfall, the last possible moment, before going to the palace.

It’s logical, he tells himself. Wait for the ephors and generals in residence to go home to their families, catch the kings alone and tired and off guard, unprepared to argue (somewhere in him, deep and cancerous, he sees their frowns and muttering and dark disappointment and thinks _no - I am loyal, a son of Sparta to the end, I swear - )_

But the only thing he manages to catch them in is a bad mood.

“We have a hundred better uses for you,” the old king says, and glances at Pausanias with wary irritation. “Here in the city, on the front, in Messenia - anywhere but Arkadia. Why should we grant you this?”

Brasidas wants to shout: because I have given you everything! Because I have offered my youth and my joy and fought your war and saved your stupid generals from themselves, and asked nothing in return!

But there is no room for emotion here. Not when there is a game of shells to play with his kings, and a life to save in Arkadia. What he needs now is a baited hook, a way to make himself into a tool Kosmos cannot resist putting to use.

Sweet grain, the _skytale_ said, keep it flowing to Attika…    

He summons all the goodwill in his name, wears his competence and accolades as armor, and breathes deep for one last lie:

“I have reason to believe that Athenian forces on the border of Arkadia are sabotaging grain shipments to the warfront.”

Pausanias’s eyes go wide. Archidamos’s chest puffs once in his _chiton_ , an unreadable gesture.

“If I allow this to go uninvestigated,” Brasidas continues, dropping his gaze to the floor, “our supply line to Attika risks severing. There’s no reason to believe the archon is complicit,” he adds, quickly. “My work will be clandestine, as always. He will not know I am there.”

The kings turn to each other - the usual muttering congress. Brasidas waits, and waits, and waits.

Go freely, they say at last. Protect the supply line. Spartan soldiers are bred to endure the harshest hunger, but starving men have never won a war. Brasidas bows deep, lets out a breath he did not know he was holding, and leaves.

Outside the palace, where he is accustomed to finding Kassandra waiting in a parcel of warm shade with eyes full of secrets, a different face meets him.

“There you are,” says Myrrine. “I take your eagerness to mean you’ve gotten permission to leave. Take only what you need; I have horses and supplies outside the city walls. We’ll ride out in an hour.”

Brasidas feels like a woodcutter who has swung with all his strength and missed the tree. “Where - _chaire_ , Myrrine - where is Kassandra?”

“Meeting us in Arkadia.” Myrrine looks at him sidelong, with honey eyes that were hers before they were Kassandra’s. He cannot shake the feeling that she is twice his height. “You are not the only one who has business with Lagos.”


	10. khrēsmē

There are a hundred unsettling things about traveling in lockstep with the mother of the woman you have recently begun to sleep with, but Brasidas thinks the worst of them may be the intrusive thoughts.

It’s an old problem, old enough that he dared to think it solved and over with. Three months’ practice among the rumoring elite of Sparta has made him subtler, slyer. He has regained control over his own mind, and even begun to think himself clever. But this is not a sneering politician or petty warlord; this is a mother whose daughter has not told her where she spends her nights.  

It will happen at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all. He will be in full gallop or sitting beneath the shade to water the horses, making a keen effort at neutral conversation, and then:

A flash of bitten lip, of fevered rocking and teeth on his hipbone. Memories crowding forward and stumbling over themselves, quick and bright and explosive as if it’s the beginning again, and he has to squeeze his eyes shut and shake his head as if image and sound can be dislodged from one’s mind like overripe fruit.

Fortunately, Myrrine - ever pointed towards her own inscrutable goal, some bright and secret constellation that exists in her sky alone - does not look at him often enough to catch him mid-flinch. In fact, she does not seem to notice him much at all.

On the first evening, they make camp on the shaded lee of a half-scorched foothill, burned long ago with wildfire. Beneath a canopy of young oaks, Myrrine sets herself on a smooth plate of granite with her spear and oil-soaked sandcloth, and leans across the fire to hand Brasidas a folded piece of papyros.

“For you,” she says mildly, “from her.”

The wax seal is plainly broken. A jolt of panic shakes him before he realizes - “Ah. You’ve read this, I imagine?”

Myrrine has already begun to scrape down her spearpoint, and tips her chin without looking at him: yes, obviously.

And therein lies a different kind of danger. A bright little voice pipes to life in his mind, saying _there is nowhere on your daughter I have not been,_ and he swallows and blinks and busies himself unfolding the letter.   

> _Brasidas: I hope this letter finds you northbound. I apologize for hurrying off - my mother found me a contact, as I hoped she would, and speaking with him could not wait._
> 
> _As for your traveling arrangements: you have not spent time with her, but rest assured that she is good company, and she knows her way in Arkadia, and you will never hunt a finer boar than the ones she will bring down for your suppers at camp. Ask her to tell you some of her war stories, if there is time - I think you will like them_ (oh, Kassandra, he thinks - your mother and I are so very, very far from that point).
> 
> _I have ridden towards Attika. Should Tyche smile, I will meet you -_

The next few phrases are illegible. He frowns and brings the paper up, squinting, closer and closer to nose-length, until Myrrine chuckles from opposite the fire and says, “Don’t worry - I know the place and time.”   

> _\- nce the kings know of your plans, Kosmos will expect our arrival, but they will not know what our intentions are. Send word if the location is compromised, but do not leave a trail for me. I will find you._
> 
> _I wish you safe travels, my friend, and very much look forward to your coming._

A twinge in his belly. He folds the letter on its creases and feels the ghost of her hands on it, her tongue in her teeth as she writes by the fading sun.

“The contact I found for her is a supply-runner for the camps outside the Long Wall.” Myrrine tips her spear up, catching firelight, judging its burnish. “He deals in Arkadian fruit and grain, and did spy-work for the archon years past. He left Sparta two days ago to escort a shipment; my hope is that Kassandra left in time to catch him before he reaches the front.”

“It’s a good lead,” Brasidas says, and wonders why he cannot seem to say anything intelligent.

“You have the spy’s orders from Kosmos - yes? I have not seen them yet.”

He produces the parchment carrying the _skytale’s_ plaintext from his _pharmaka_ -pouch, hidden among the herbs and poultices of battlefield medicine. Myrrine scans it in silence, and he sets about his own weaponkeeping rituals: a vinegar scrub for his shield, a treatment of oil for the grip of his spear, a rasp and sandcloth to scour the rust from its blades.

Finally, when the quiet begins to gnaw at him, he prompts her: “What do you think?”

“Grain isn’t sweet,” Myrrine says simply.

Brasidas begins to laugh at that - such a plain, odd thing to notice - but it stops in his throat as he realizes: no, it isn’t, is it? Which makes _sweet_ an anomaly in the text, something useless and ornamental that adds no value. Coded orders are no place for poetry, especially a _skytale_ where letterspace is precious; it must change the meaning of the sentence, or it would not have been included.

He thinks back to those long rows of plant-milk letters lined up so neatly on Kassandra’s arm, searching for signs, for patterns. Was it a mistake in the encoding, or a junk word they neglected to strip out? No - the writing is too neat and the words too lengthy for careless error, and the placement too specific…   

He turns to Myrrine, who is waving for his attention and frowning down at the parchment. “These here, are these names? I cannot read my daughter’s handwriting.”

“Yes - I’ll rewrite them. I’ve brought ink.” She passes it back, and as he begins to search his pack for his reed-pen, he adds, almost absentmindedly, “I often think that if all of Sparta’s secret messages were written by Kassandra, then we would not need _skytales_.”

They smile at that, and share a look, and he thinks with reckless optimism: perhaps he will manage to ask Myrrine about her war stories after all.

 _I have made your daughter beg for me in her,_ says his other self, a terrible and annoying self that he wishes he could muzzle, and he pushes himself to his feet with slightly too much urgency. “This can wait. It’s getting too dark to hunt.”

“No - you stay, General.”

Myrrine rises from the fire like storm surge, like caldera smoke - swift and sure and inevitable. “My daughter promised you a boar from my spear. I would hate to make a liar of her.”

\---

What to make of Myrrine?

It haunts him through the second day, a queasy mixture of wants. One one hand, the need for her to like him, to respect him - she is Kassandra’s mother, after all, and he has been raised to know that motherhood is ultimate - but beneath that, something cold. For every part of him that understands Myrrine is Kassandra’s last family, the closest and most important part of her, there is another that remembers the break of her voice on that rocky hill in Sparta, and is angry.

You left her, he thinks with a withering resentment that doesn’t belong to him. You chose between your children that night, and it was the wrong choice. You allowed your daughter to grow up alone in the harshest, farthest place, so what is your claim to her now?

And then he pushes that down, because on review, it really is very important that Myrrine like him.

The horses tire earlier on the second day, embogged in suction mud left across the valley by a shock of rain (“Gods take this wet fucking marsh,” Myrrine swears, sinking to the shin when they dismount and nearly making Brasidas slip). The fire hisses and sputters on damp wood. In the dark foothills, Myrrine brings down a boar twice her size from fifty paces, lancing heart and lung through thick shoulder-hide with unearthly accuracy. It dies so quickly that the meat tastes rich and tart and nothing at all like fear.

“Your throw is incredible,” Brasidas says - out of genuine respect, as much as it comes out like a bid for favor. “Straight and low. Not a motion out of place.” And then, because their conversations always seem to come back to the only thing they have in common: “I've seen Kassandra do the same. She hunts like you.”

Myrrine considers him for a long, distressing moment before returning her attention to the meat blackening on her knife. Her mouth is quirked, almost smiling, in some unknowable mosaic of pride and sorrow. “If she does, then I am not the one that taught her.”

Brasidas’s skin prickles at the thing she has not said: _because I was not allowed to raise her._ Unthinkingly, whetted by years of social warfare with kings and ephors, he reaches for the strategy in her words: a ploy? A way to put him on the defensive, to make him apologize for bringing up a bitter memory?

But then she continues, without malice, and he feels ashamed to have made her pain into combat.

“I tried a few times,” she muses, “as soon as she was strong enough to hold a javelin. We would go to the greenwood below Menelaion to thin the wolves. But she was too young, I think, to understand what I wanted her to learn.”

She turns her eyes on him again (he really should pick up this habit, he thinks: looking into people as if you know all their secrets). “There was nothing wrong with her form, mind. Kassandra came to her grace very early. Her approach was good - swift, like the stoop of an osprey - and her throw was lean, like mine. But always she would hesitate.”

A phalanx of memories musters in his mind. Her movements in Korinthia, measured as if by drumbeat. Slipping by him, punching through his guard as if it were a shadow, and dropping from the rafters - that single unbroken motion of pin, pierce, carve - to wash his war table in blood. A Kassandra that hesitates is not the one he knows.

“I hated seeing it,” Myrrine murmurs, her gaze back on the fire. “The stay in her hand, that breathless pause. I knew it would have to be corrected, if she was to survive the burden of her blood.”

A story there, too - something in her voice that signals a deeper, vaster fear - but Brasidas does not press.

The fire snaps and tosses an ember into the air. A swell of heat catches and juggles it, carrying it up through the trees, and Myrrine sighs and rolls her shoulders in a jarring mirror of her daughter. “These memories are old. Precious to me, of course, but orphaned. There is no thread that connects them to who she is now. Too many moments are missing."

Treading on dangerous ground now. _A shame,_ he should say, _it’s in the past, at least you have her now,_ and go back to scraping the rust from his spear in respectful silence.

"Moments like what?" he asks.

“Her first race.”

It comes out immediately, as if it takes no thought at all.

“Her first dance, the first letter she wrote. The first weapon she made, or the first time she rode a horse - which she does so beautifully now, so naturally.”

There’s a regret in her voice that Brasidas hopes he will never understand. The words run forward distant and ringing, rushing like meltwater, as if these things have carved channels in her: “I could not help her with her first blood, her first heartache. I could not teach her how strange and unfair the world would be to her. I know nothing of her loves, or her wounds. I don’t know what she dreams of, or what she values in a friend, or where she hangs her weapons at night - ah, but now I am speaking of things you already know.”

Brasidas looks at her sharply,and wishes he hadn’t.

The fire plays in Myrrine’s eyes, bringing them sharp and gold out of the shadows of her face, and he cannot tell if that light is mirth or violence. Without his permission, his raised brows and slack mouth pose a stupid, guileless question: how did you know?

“My daughter is not as subtle as she thinks she is,” Myrrine explains, and Brasidas’s breath comes out in a rush when he hears the laughter caged in her voice. “And you - your training is good. I might not have noticed, if I didn’t know. But you should see to your expressions.”

“My - what?” It is suddenly very important that his face remain utterly and perfectly neutral. “What do you mean?”

“Whenever you have a thought you hope I cannot hear, you make a face like you’ve stared into the sun, and then look at the ground. Like this.”

And she does it - a cutting imitation, so perfectly familiar that he wants to laugh in horror. _Your daughter tastes like metal and cherries_ , sings his mind in gleeful abandon; he groans and presses the heels of his hands to his eyes, and Myrrine’s laughter rises through the trees like smoke.

“How long?” she asks when the air has cleared.

Brasidas does a quick tabulation. Two summer festivals, three campaigns, and all those nights in his apartment, in Pitana, by the river or the hills of Menelaion…

“Three months, and two years’ feinting before it,” he guesses. And then, although he feels a man his age should not care: “You’re not angry?”

“Would that change anything?”

 _No._ “Maybe.”

Myrrine chuckles, a light and unthreatened sound. It reminds him that she has been an archon and a captain of corsairs, and that she has made reading minds her talent.

“You are not children,” she says. “I trust you have tallied the risks, and acted with caution. Beyond that: I believe Kassandra to be a good judge of character. You, on the other hand - ”

A chill settles in him, like dipping his shoulders in cold water. This is it, he thinks darkly: Myrrine will warn me off, and I will refuse, and it will be like poison between us. Between all of us.

But she merely says: “I think it is your judgment we must worry about, if you have made a friend of this agent of Kosmos we are going to kill.”

“We are not going to _kill_ him,” Brasidas says heatedly, but Myrrine holds up her hand, and (is it his imagination?) a preternatural hush seems to come over the clearing.

“We will speak of it in Arkadia,” she decrees, and that’s that.

Moodily, Brasidas considers the treeline. Humming, unmoved, Myrrine uses her spear to push herself to her feet and begins to choke the fire with neat sweeps of dirt and mud. The shroud of insects and leaf-rustle and trilling nightbirds creates an absolutely smothering silence.

“I want her happiness,” Brasidas says, half to himself. “That’s all.”

Myrrine nods. “I believe that. What I do not believe is that you are not sick, somewhere, like the rest.”

“The rest?”

She casts a hand out, marking the trees, the sky, the dead fire. Everything. “There is a venom in our people. Violence, self-destruction - set deep, like a barbed arrow. You cannot pick them apart any more than you can take heat from a flame.”

Myrrine’s frown is patient, gentle - anything but malicious. Somehow, that makes it worse. “The thing you want for her, for yourself - you must know it’s not possible. It’s not in your blood.”

She's wrong. She knows nothing of him, of his mind and the secrets he has learned to share with Kassandra. He wants to tell her: _I am the flame without heat. I will die grey, frail_ , _in a bed of furs, not in battle. Warm and old and surrounded by people I love -_

But then the carnage: the blood won by his schemes, by his easy victories. The pawns on his war-table, flesh made wood for easier sacrificing. The bruised face of that broken man, that helot-son at the Hyakinthia - his name, what was his _name_? - looking with purest loathing at the Spartiate who could not give up his glory.

_No, I will be better. I see the sickness, the madness. I will give the world -_

_\- give her -_

_\- something better than the heads of my enemies._

“You’re running,” Myrrine sighs, and her pity is so heavy that it cloys the air. “Running so fast - and you can see her ahead of you, I know, and that makes you think you have gotten away. Nikolaos was the same - my Nikos, my sky.”

She sinks back to the ruins of the fire, sitting on her heels, dragged down by some quiet horror. “He was not like the rest, I thought: an oak among reeds, so steady and solid. He swore to choose me, always me, always the family we would build. I loved him without restraint, without vigilance, because I thought I had saved him.”

Myrrine looks at him, and her eyes are empty as the heart of a storm. “And then he threw my children from the sacred mountain, so that their lives might purchase his laurels. All my love and hope - and screams, in the end - could not change the color of his blood.”

Brasidas’s insides are a void, a free-falling awfulness. “I am not Nikolaos,” is all he can manage to say, and Myrrine considers him for a long and desolate moment.

“No,” she murmurs finally, “no, you are not. But Sparta draws all her men back to her heart in the end - to vainglory, to rapturous sacrifice, or some other disease. My daughter is strong enough to survive it, gods willing, but you will take some of her with you when you go.”

That same crushing sincerity. Bare and honest. He’s cornered, weight on his back leg, arms raised in defense against blows that seem to come from everywhere.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he says haltingly, helplessly. “I meant what I said. I want her happiness, as she wants mine. I intend to stay as long as she will have me.”

Myrrine looks at him sadly, so sadly - as if he has misunderstood her so completely that there is no point trying to correct him. “I did not say anything about your intent.”

And then she rises again and slips into the dark between the trees, leaving Brasidas confused and unsettled, with a pit of worry in his gut that even Kassandra crashing into his arms the next day, breathing him in like a drowner given air, can’t dispel.

\---

The three of them look out over the pink blossoms and sun-steeped valleys of Arkadia, parceled by cloud-cover into a patchwork of green and dark earth, and negotiate the murder of Brasidas’s oldest friend.

“Lagos feeds Sparta,” he says, his voice tight and clipped. “Without his grain, we starve - home and warfront both. We cannot act carelessly.”

Myrrine looks at him with leonine calm. Her armor replaced, her flayed nerves sewn closed and stitched safely out of view. The shadows on her face are pronounced in the light, and seeing the two of them side by side makes Brasidas wonder what Kassandra will look like with creases around her eyes and cold disregard on her mouth.

“Kosmos, not Sparta, masters him,” Myrrine counters. “The basket he fills is for them.”

“That does not change the fact that upsetting it would cause a crisis that the capital is unprepared to manage.”

“Allowing cryptarchs to control our food supply will cause greater discord. If we do not cut out the poison, it will grow.”

“And how would you cut the poison out?”

“Burn his grain. Kill his honor guard. Draw him out, and cut his throat.”

His mouth wants to twitch; he stops it. _Violence in us_ , he thinks - _a deep and bloodthirsty venom_. Looking at Myrrine now, Brasidas realizes that she was not excluding herself.

“Lagos does not deserve death,” he snaps before he can stop himself, and winces when he sees contempt light Myrrine’s eyes.

“He is not your friend, General,” she says, her voice like a glass knife. “He is a tool. A sharp thing with sharp edges that cuts wherever Kosmos needs blood drawn.”

Kassandra glances between them, owl-eyed, knowing that something has happened and unwilling to ask what.

“I will not do this,” Brasidas says, hearing his own tiredness in his voice. “I am sorry, Myrrine.”

They both look at Kassandra, and Kassandra looks at the ground, and there is a chilly silence. All at once, Brasidas sees how the web of politics that fascinated him on Korkyra - that complex truss of pressures and bonds and obligations - runs between people, too.

Kassandra’s downcast face holds a storm. He can feel her thinking. This is what she feared, he knows: something that should be pure and logical, tangled in that web and marred by emotion. For this and every choice that comes after it, they both will be asked: was this warped by affection?

Finally, she raises her eyes and looks at neither of them.

“We will save Lagos,” Kassandra says, contemplating the remains of last night’s fire.

Myrrine sighs audibly. “Kassandra.”

“People can change,” Kassandra says evenly. “They can go to evil, and they can come back from it. We must believe that, _mater._ ”

Myrrine’s lips thin to a sliver, and she looks out across the valley as if she cannot stand to look anywhere else. In the silence after Kassandra’s voice, Brasidas realizes that a different sort of affection has warped this decision, and fights down the urge to take her in his arms.

Wordlessly, Myrrine turns back to them, takes her daughter by the shoulders, and draws her down for a kiss on each cheek. Brasidas expects something more, then - a frown or withering scowl, or some other parting blow - but Myrrine merely nods to him before turning around and walking away.

“You can’t really tell,” Kassandra says, watching her mother vanish over the curve of the hill, “but I think she’s happy.”

“You’re right. I can’t tell.” Then, confused: “Happy about what?”

She smiles and snakes an arm around his back, pulling them hip to hip. “That I found one with a spine.”

“Have you?” He chuckles without humor. Myrrine’s every word, every calm and sorrowful expression in her dark honey eyes, hangs in his bones like mercury. “Or have you found a fool that doesn’t know what he is and when to give up?”

A pause, and then Kassandra pulls him around and embraces him. She presses them length to length, her arms cinching tight around his waist and back, and for the briefest of moments, Brasidas is not confused at all.

“Come,” she murmurs into his shoulder. “Let us prove that your Lagos is a good man.”


	11. pharmaki

The world laughs at him that night, saying: _prove it._

Good, you say - you keep saying - his hands are soft, and his heart is peaceful, and he would never use his power to wound. He wanted a farm, a family, and nothing more. There was never conquest in him.

Prove it.

Show me how brotherhood is sacred. Show me those bonds between friends are true and indelible. Show me that when there is light in a person, it can be warped and transmuted, but never erased.

This voice is familiar, Brasidas thinks. Dark, dispassionate: edged with tempered steel and a life's disappointment. Show me, she says -

\- in that calm tone, all gravel and bare sincerity -

\- that the poison tangled in you, intricate as basketweave, is not everything you are.

He comes out of it like a diver out of the sea, out of dread and into morning silence with dream-fog streaming off him in rivulets. Shapes of murk, of void, coalesce into the wretched wet heat of Peloponnesian autumn. Hawk-gold eyes melt into canvas walls, caked with dust and impossibly still.

On him, Kassandra sleeps. Her chin is notched into his shoulder, her arm across his chest like a sword-sling. The whisper of her breath tickles his neck, and her hair lies damp and tangled across him, a dark blaze in the sandstone glow of dawnlight.

“We could go,” Brasidas slurs - startled by his own voice. He wasn't sure he was awake, not entirely. “Phoinike, maybe. Anatole, Illyria. Thrake. A hundred places. They would not know us. They would not make us into gods or generals. We would be us, only us. Do you want to?”

No break in her breathing. Her lips twitch, locked in some deep dream of her own, and she shifts on him: arms a little tighter, mouth a little closer. The join of their skin is hot and slippery and uncomfortable. Every day they wake up like this, but still she does it, and still he does not stop her.

“The snakes are in the well,” she informs him in a bleary mutter, and a smile fills him like sun through lakewater. He closes his arm around her back, rests his chin on her head, and lets her sleep a little longer.

\---

Arkadia is rich, and it shows in her markets, in the fabric of her commerce.

Rushing by: loud sales and laughing uproar, a bard or busker on every corner. Stalls crowded with shoes and pendants and wood figurines, and then the food - fish, wine, fruits, and confections, strewn in a reeking polychrome array across groaning tables. The noise and cheer are overpowering, friends and lovers indistinguishable from strangers in the throes of barter. Women here on the street in bright yellow dresses, buying and bargaining with careless pride, their pack animals sagging with cloth and skins and lumber for their estates - a thing you would not see outside the peninsula.

You can feel the wealth in these paved streets, the swell of health in these shouting people. Lagos has done well, Brasidas thinks, and specifically does not add _for Kosmos._

Beside him, Kassandra puts a hand to the small of his back. “Look.”

Brasidas follows the flick of her chin across the _agora_ , where the door of the house they have been watching cracks open and swings inward. A man steps out, enormous enough that he needs to stoop to clear the rain-rotted frame.

“Big, light skin,” Kassandra whispers, tallying: “A broken nose, and a scar - that’s him, Brasidas. Arkadia's spymaster.”

Brasidas squints into the sun. The man has begun to walk, shoulders squared, solid as a quarry in his naked white _chiton._ The pale pink of a slashed throat stands ugly and shining across the curve of his neck. He does not look like a spy, nor like he fears them. “You're sure?”

Kassandra nods once, and they fall into step.

They measure their following distance at a hundred paces. She has androgynized herself as much as her body allows, threading her hair into a Spartiate’s braid and hiding her hips with loose pteryges and a crimson hoplite’s cloak, but anything beyond a passing glance will give her away. Their mark stops occasionally, scanning his surroundings with idle fingers brushing the surface of a table or tentpole as if considering a purchase (that, more than anything, tells Brasidas this is the right man), and they turn to each other in expert pantomime, gesturing like distracted city guards on an obligatory patrol.

Then it becomes difficult. They pass through the gates into Tegea itself, out of the shaded squares of red sackcloth tarps and into sparse trade-roads where the crowd is thin and there are more helots than soldiers.

“No good,” Brasidas mutters, touching Kassandra's elbow, and she nods mutely - and the next time the spy turns around, they are gone.

They spot him again from the top of Tegea’s northeastern guard tower: a hulking column of a man ambling through scaffolds and lumberyards along the city’s defensive wall in a show of calculated apathy. From this vantage point, his patterns are laughably obvious, artless as a novice’s _petteia_ openers, and for a time it becomes a game of watching and waiting.  

The wind is strong here, a reprieve from the valley’s thick heat, and their crimson cloaks (his owned, hers stolen) lie in a forgotten heap against the wall. Brasidas's arms still burn from the ascent - he's built for combat, not climbing - and as they stand against the parapet watching their mark’s rudderless progress, Kassandra kneads idle circles on his back with a bubbling mixture of sympathy and glee.

“It wasn’t bad, for a beginner,” she offers. “It comes from practice, and it’s about grip more than anything. Climb enough towers and temples, and the finger strength will come.”

“I've heard no complaints about my finger strength,” he says, and she laughs so loudly that they both have to clap a hand to her mouth and scan for patrols.

“Pay attention,” she giggles between her fingers. “If you have time to brag, you have time to watch our Ajax.”

“That man's bigger than Ajax by half. I’ll tell you what: you can interrogate him, and I'll be here practicing my climbing.”

And then he stands straight and forward, shading his eyes against the sun, because - “He's gone.”

Kassandra whirls, and her braid nearly slaps him in the face. “ _What_ \- ”

“No, it’s all right.” He steadies her, pointing out across the golden cradle, Arkadia’s fertile valley. “There’s only one place he could have gone. That building on the far edge of the wheatfields - a safehouse or meeting place?”

She studies at the house on the horizon with a sharp sort of hunger. “We’ll know soon enough." 

They gather their weapons, fix their armor, and revisit their plans, their contingencies, their agreements on where to meet should all those plans go sour. But when Brasidas has finally collected himself and crouched at the tower’s cityward wall to prepare for the hellish descent, he notices that Kassandra has not followed.

She’s still at the scalloped wall of the tower's edge, regarding the first colors of sundown: currant and rosewood, a bronze wash over the bounty of Lagos’s land. Her arm is outstretched over the parapet. Her crimson cloak - her soldier’s camouflage, a Spartiate’s dearest treasure - flies wild and whipping in her fist.

“Red for courage,” Kassandra calls over the blow of the wind, watching the stiff wool thrash as if in agony. Her stance says ritual; her voice speaks loathing. “For valor, and sacrifice.”

“For hiding our wounds,” Brasidas says, and finds that it comes from the gut.

Kassandra looks back, searching him.

(It ricochets through his mind as he thinks about what she’s asking, a booming voice in a small room. The bark of his trainers, a fearsome conditioning: this gift is given to you by the state, your first and only master. It is your merit, your station, your laurels and loyalty. Lose it, and what are you?)

Brasidas stands. Reaches up, as if governed by a whim or moment of madness - something outside himself - to undo the clasps of his own cloak. He matches her at the wall, and they stand like twin heralds with their scarlet banners, feeling the greedy grab of the wind - _let me, let me have them -_

Kassandra smiles at him, a thing of liquid gold.

The cloaks rip from their fingers, snatched by an updraft, and dance there for a moment like the bloom of a flower, or blood in water.

\---

The old farmhouse is harder to find from the ground, barely visible from the city limit and nestled in a clutch of goat pastures and lashed hayshocks. Out back, well-maintained silos packed with grain (interesting). The main building is neither large nor luxurious from the outside, and abandoned by any measure - striped in cracking red and white paint, with rich snarls of ivy and wildflower bursting through its boarded windows.

“Locked,” Kassandra says, “that’s a good sign,” and kicks the door in.

They enter sidelong, back-to-back with shield and weapons raised, but the house is empty. If this is where Ajax had his meeting or made his dead drop, it was a quick and clean one.

“But _someone_ has been here,” Kassandra says in triumph, pointing out the signs - potted flowers kept green and alive, grape-saucers recently cleaned, amphorae trussed together with fresh young leather. In one corner, the cinders of a bronze tripod still breathe ash and smoke into the air. “I’ll search the _androns_ here in the front.”

“I’ll take the _oikos_ and bedrooms. Shout if you find something.”

Brasidas finds the back rooms clean and lovingly arranged. Documents stacked in high orderly towers like the squares of a trellis, and sheafs of scrolls against every wall, columned with calculations, nearly blackened through by writing so fine and small that he has to squint to read it. Orders for lumber-carts and lead pots, invoices, trade terms, census reports, tax riders, sprawling catalogs of exports and imports - immaculately kept.

With a smile and a memory that skims his mind like dragonfly legs, he notes: no matter where in the room he goes, he is ever within reach of a reed-pen and inkpot.

The nervous thrum in his bones begins, at last, to dissipate. This is Lagos, unquestionably. His signature, a geometric calligraphy Brasidas remembers with startling clarity, is stamped on every parchment and unscraped palimpsest - and even if it were not, these neat lines and meticulous logistics speak his friend’s name louder than any document.

And yet, no masks of bone. No symbols in red paint, or ominous orders, or spider-black wool robes stashed in a corner. This is the house of an accountant, an enterprising farmer. Even better: an honest ruler, a man who has traded spear for pen and blood for ink.

In the house's second bedroom, halfheartedly concealed beneath a mound of skins, Brasidas uncovers a line of pots stretching from wall to wall, lead-silver and filled to the brim with raw brassy clumps of metal.

“Gold here,” he calls, stunned, sifting through it, “enough to fund a new navy, and buy every man in Sparta a new cloak.”

“Good! It’s been a while since I’ve gotten paid.” Kassandra’s voice ricochets through the building. “Wait - gold, or _drachmae_?”

“Gold. Unminted.”

“Too much trouble!”

Brasidas chuckles, sieving the flakes like sand through his fingers. “A mercenary who doesn’t like free money?”

Rustling, light footsteps, and Kassandra appears at the threshold with a pyramid of scrolls packed under one arm and a reed-pen in her mouth.

“Is that any stranger,” she asks, removing the pen and showing him the malevolent glint of her teeth, “than a naval officer who hates the ocean?”

Brasidas considers and abandons several ripostes, because it’s true.

“It’s for the best.” She passes by him, and gives his arm a squeeze that is almost mocking. “Muscle sinks. You’d drop like a stone.”

He looks at her, intending to roll his eyes, but she’s stopped mid-stride with that lion’s gaze fixed intently on the hollow of his throat, and he doesn’t quite manage it.

They seem to inhale together. Her hand has not moved. She looks up, and the thread of their eyes pulls taut as bolt-rope on a sail - and just like that, the scrolls and pen are on the floor and he’s backed against the wall, ensconced in wood and tapestry, held there with hands and body and Kassandra’s sly smile on his neck.

Telegraphing his abortive protest - something feeble and without fire, _now, really?_ \- she guides his hand down her chest and stomach, and bites at the underside of his chin (she has always found his height, those few fingerwidths he has on her, a delightful challenge), and the words drain out of him like brain fluid.

Such an old story, he chides himself. Inflamed by peril, made stupid by the knife-edge of danger. And what an end for them that would be: naked, blood-slick, forever entangled in their final pleasures. So much for that, the bards will say - goddess and her favored hero both brought to fall by foolish appetite - but she’s trembling against him, and he can feel the work of her hips on his fingers, and his body doesn’t much care for his mind’s paranoia.

It doesn’t take long. He knows Kassandra the way he knows himself: the way to draw it out for hours, and the way to end it quick as a thunderclap. They are dressed again and ready by the time they hear the front door groan open, and although coming makes her sleepy, she crouches by the door with an edge and energy that only comes from spy-work.

“Fucking lock is broken,” a man’s voice says.

Footsteps and low conversation at the front of the house. Kassandra looks back at him with sheepish alarm.

"Shit,” she whispers, her eyes wide, assessing, “should we - ”

Then a crash like a quicklime explosion as the bedroom door slams shut.

“NO,” Kassandra bellows, and launches herself against the thick wood, “no, _fuckers_ \- “

She kicks at it, swearing, roaring, but they’ve blocked it with something heavy - (a bookrack, or that wardrobe in the hall? No, not important, _think_ ) - and Brasidas’s eyes go up, around the room with its wide walls and high ceiling, scanning for exits. Listening, with a prickle in his spine, for the hiss of dry wood or sackcloth catching a spark.

“There!” Kassandra shouts. He follows the line of her arm and finger to a window overhead, a sliver of light in the dust - too high to jump, even for her -

He turns around and sets his feet apart in a boxing stance, weight on the back foot for defense and stability, lacing his fingers into a sling and holding them before him as if in benediction. In barely a heartbeat, Kassandra’s eyes flick between his face, the window, the cup of his hands - counting, calculating - and then, setting her back foot back like a sprinter, she erupts.

The weight burns his arms. He can feel the bones of his fingers crowding, grinding, but he clamps his jaw and closes his eyes and tunes himself to her: to the hydraulic rush of her muscles as the power coils up through her feet, her calves, her thighs -

And lifts, _lifts_ with everything he has, throwing his weight up and back like tearing a tree from its roots.

The force of it puts him in the dirt, but she’s in the window, grabbing handfuls of wood and clay to pull herself through. She turns back over her shoulder with knitted brows; he can see her shift her weight back and unfurl her arm, wasting time, _wasting time_ -

“GO,” he roars, and she goes, and he turns around and sets his shoulder to work against the barricaded door.

\---

Dawnsky outside. It’s the pink of pearls, laced with blue and purple like Kytheran snail-dye, but no time for looking -

“Sorry, very sorry,” Brasidas shouts breathlessly, caroming off a market-stall and strewing the pavement with grapes and figs.

How many voices did he hear in that house? How many spies scattering now, slipping away across the city to vanish into their mouse-holes? Air-starved, his brain works at it, clutching at the blinking memory: two, three, and then a fourth one to hush them all, just before the door slammed shut -   

He comes to a split in the road. Kassandra has left him a trail of sorts, made of frazzled onlookers and overturned tripods spilling their embered guts across the street. Yes - that means she has a good lead, that she wants him to follow her, not just find her later at their prearranged meeting place.

But the trail is not just crowds and spilled coals, he realizes with a jolt. There’s blood on the stones, fresh and red, scattered through the _agora_ in great sickening splashes.

Nausea takes him. For all her scars, Brasidas has never seen Kassandra bleed. He gulps a breath into tight lungs, burning lungs, and rounds the corner -

And there he fucking is. Ajax himself, taller by two heads and thick as a silo, with an ugly hammer-headed mace in his butcher’s hands. Three men are running up beside him, smaller (they would have to be), but armored and slamming their shields with their swords. Side-by-side, they look like the spine of a ship: towering mainmast and trembling forestays, set vicious and snapping across his path.

Brasidas lifts his shield and thinks, sourly, that he would rather be practicing his climbing.

Two of the men charge him immediately. Victims of haste and bad discipline - things he has seen before, things he drills out of his hoplites at soonest opportunity.  

Good. For his purposes, they can now be considered out of play.

As the first reaches him, he goes down in a boxer’s crouch and collapses himself behind his shield, bracing it against his bruised shoulder and slamming it into the man’s legs - a brutal bull-rush that levers him up, over, to the ground. Hidden by shield-cover and that tumbling airborne body, Brasidas’s spearpoint navigates the geometry of defense to find the soft gut of his second opponent. A twist, to rip the bowels, and he withdraws and retreats two steps, using the spear’s back-blade to pin the grounded man behind him to the pavement through his belly.  

He steps back. Resets his stance. It was a good trade: only two left now and he’s barely spent, and it happened so fast and so bloodily that there must, _must_ be some kind of horror setting in…

Ajax lunges, and Brasidas learns with utmost displeasure that he is faster than he looks.

He barely raises his shield in time. The hammer clips his cheekbone, and a taste of iron floods his mouth and nose - blood, or headshock? Doesn’t matter - he backs up and turns the second strike away, but it rattles his body like hitting a tree with a practice sword.

Again and again Ajax swings, with perfect striking discipline and unrelenting rhythm. The blows shake him, vibrating his jaw, smashing his shield into his purpling shoulder. There are no gaps, no openings, and at the gauzy edge of his periphery Brasidas can see the fourth man advancing sidelong with shield and _xiphos_ raised, seeking flank and exposed flesh.

No time ( _slam_ ) do something, now, before ( _slam_ ) learn, adapt; isn't that what you ( _slam_ ) -

He drops his guard and trades Ajax the next blow. Inelegant; dumb and graceless as a fucking mule-kick, but not at all what the big man is expecting.

Brasidas pitches back, chest-struck and gasping. Little explosions behind his eyes, black suns on colorless sky, as he tries to breathe. For a moment he wonders, absently, where his spear has gone, but of course -

In front of him, Ajax is screaming a long, horrible, punctured scream that grates like swordpoint on sandstone. His eyes are rolling, wild with rage and bafflement as he slides, thrashing, down the long haft of Brasidas’s spear. His body forms a shrinking angle with the ground, smaller, smaller, until he lays there unmoving, an obscene weapon rack holding the spear nearly vertical with thick muscle and gut-flesh.

Belatedly, Brasidas remembers the fourth man, circling him like a fledgling raptor - but by the time he looks up, the street is empty.

Bracing Ajax with his foot, he tears the spear from the body and keeps running.

Some minutes later, he finds Kassandra by the city’s east wall. She’s pacing circles around a bloodied man curled on the ground with his joints bound in thick hemp, wringing her hands and ripping at her cuticles.

“Fucking _Hades_ ,” she snaps when she sees him, and collides with him in a clumsy, painful embrace. Crushed in her arms, he passes his hands over her shoulders, her chest, her hips, and finds her unmarked. The blood - naturally - was not hers.

“Lead,” she says with slack horror, muffled against him, “They boil grapes in lead pots, and it turns to a sweet syrup, and they coat the grain in it before the shipments go out to the warfront. It’s toxic - it poisons them, makes them barren - ”

Ice in Brasidas’s stomach. He knows the signs of lead-sickness. He’s seen it abroad, in Athens and its holdings, where they mix that sweet syrup every day into their wine and meat. In weeks, the fighting young of Sparta will vomit and slur their words and find themselves slow and dull on the battlefield; next year they will be found sterile, and fail their first and foremost duty as citizens.

 _There were lead pots in Lagos’s safehouse_ , he thinks numbly, and wishes he could unthink it. _Lead pots and grain in those silos, and a hearth for boiling…_

“Philonoe and Niloxenos,” he says to the beaten spy over Kassandra's shoulder, and she pulls away to watch the answer. “Who are they?”

The man’s mouth is thin with loathing. His chest shudders, every breath dragged rasping through torn skin and broken ribs. A fragment of courage, possibly, lingers in his eyes, but Kassandra stands motionless above him in silent warning: a threat made with the fact of her body and the bloodied edge of her broken spear.

“His family,” the man chokes out. Then, coughing wetly and spitting a shining alloy of blood and chipped teeth, "His wife, his son. His yoke and cage. The thing that keeps him good, and tame, and ours.”

Pointlessly, Brasidas thinks:  _don’t say it._

“Glory to Kosmos,” the spy rasps, and bites through his tongue.


	12. desma

Yoke and cage.

Words for animals, for livestock. Things that control and contain. Lagos showed them his savancy, his careful mathematics and eye for rule, and Kosmos wanted him, of course - and then he showed them there were things in this world he could not bear to lose, and they made those things into manacles.

He made it easy for them, so easy. In Sparta a family is obligation and immortality, a stake hammered through eternity, a way for blood to endure and a name to live forever; not so for Lagos. A family is a thing to love, he said once as he trailed his fingers in the river - dreaming of a daughter, of teaching her geometry.

They could have the discussion right now. The best time would have been months ago, the moment Kassandra kissed Brasidas on that hill in Sparta and shattered their hard-wrought levies of caution and control, but the second-best is here in the cradle of of Arkadia watching, with mute horror, the reach and wreckage of their enemies.

Kosmos is here with them. It has never left. Sharp-fanged and many-eyed, with the ghost of Kassandra’s brother at its head, hating her every ounce of stolen happiness.

 _I trust you have tallied the risks_ , Myrrine said, but they haven’t. Not aloud, or honestly. Brasidas has been stubborn, cocksure - _whatever comes, we will triumph_ , a child’s confidence _-_ and Kassandra willfully blind. Like a golden god throwing a discus to her lover, heedless of the jealous wind that waits in the shade.

\---

The spy bleeds to death on the pavement.

His body thrashes. Chest and limbs jerking, twisting. Blood filling his mouth, choking him, and awful wet animal noises from his throat. An end so sluggish and undignified that it grips Brasidas’s eyes like a blacksmith’s pincer and forbids him to look away.

“There’s time to save him,” he says, feeling very far from himself. “A healer could stop the bleeding. He could live.”

Kassandra’s shoulders rise, hold, and fall. Discipline in a breath. “For what?”

They would continue the interrogation. They would bind him to a healer’s cot at first, then a chair, and force him to write or sketch, because he could no longer speak. They would try to bribe him, and when that failed, they would beat him cruelly and uselessly and watch him bite the clot over and over, ripping it open, until the last of him came out thin and weak between his teeth.

Always more of this.

“He picked a slow way,” Kassandra says, thick-voiced, and looks toward a crop of silos standing like cenotaphs in the east.

A few more agonizing minutes before silence and stillness. They close the man’s eyes, red and glassy with hemorrhage, offer a prayer to the earth (a look between them; what rites does an agent of chaos deserve, or even want?), and bury him outside the wall at the join of the wheatfields.

“Where he can finally do some good,” Kassandra murmurs, and leaps to her feet as if shaking off a dream or blanket of dust. “Forget him, Brasidas. This is what we needed. We’ve proven it!”

Brasidas looks at her, bemused. “Proven what?”

“ _Lagos!_ ” Her smile builds. She grabs his hands in a rush of triumph and relief: “He doesn’t want any part of this. He’s innocent, just trying to protect the people he loves. Any of us would do the same, if - ”

She falters and drops his hands as if burned, as if it were not already much too late. “Anyway - it’s simple, now. His family is the instrument of their power over him. If we find them and cut them out of Kosmos’s web, Lagos will be free.”

Something in him remembers their _petteia_ games, how his friend would move the stones with mildest dispassion and beat him soundly with gambit after unknowable gambit, and he thinks - _isn't Lagos too clever for hostages_? But Kassandra is beaming at him, waiting for him to be happy, with a pure and honest faith shining out of her like sunflare. Saying it would bring it all back: the tight eyes and tension that chokes the air like naphtha fumes, and that brittle half-smile as she waits to lose all hope that Kosmos can be sucked like snake venom out of a person you love.  

“Yes,” Brasidas hears himself say, “he’ll be free.”

Kassandra nods in satisfaction and starts to pace. Her mind awhir, plotting the shortest course: “We have a few hours, generously, before Kosmos sees what we’re after. We could go back to the safehouse before they can clean it out, or try our luck breaking into the archon’s estate. But - ” A flash of anguish across her face. “The grain, _fuck_. We can’t let those shipments keep going to Attika.”

It is impossible to triage them. Each moment is a consequence: a soldier mustering under a white-masked banner, burying Lagos’s family deeper and throwing caltrops across their path, or another dose of poison for an oblivious boy in metal and horsehair wondering why his spear arm will not obey him.

Brasidas spreads his hands: a task in each. “We split it.”

“No,” Kassandra says immediately, instinctively - and then shakes her head as if coming back to herself. “I mean, yes, you're right. My mother is still in Tegea. I’ll find her, tell her to ride to the front and have her supply-runner block trade from Arkadia until we can stop this.”

“Then I’ll take the safehouse. If anything there hints at where they’re keeping Lagos’s family, I will find it.” And then he chuckles, remembering: “Your mother - she wanted to burn the grain from the beginning, didn’t she?”

A puff of laughter through Kassandra’s nose. “And we will not hear the end of it.”

They share in that smile as long as they dare. In the damp heat and brutal sun of morning, Brasidas touches her shoulder, draws her to him, and kisses her forehead. Neither of them says goodbye.

\---

First: the _agora_.

It’s unthinkable, now that the urgency has passed, that he left those men in the streets without searching their packs and pouches - or that he did not stop to hide their bodies, a fundamental precaution against enemies that watch like foxes in snow for movement and mistakes. If his trainers could see him now: flustered and careless, leaving trails of blood and bone like a wounded wildcat…

But the corpses are gone, blood and all, by the time he gets there.

Watching from inside a clutch of shoppers, Brasidas fights down a chill and the capsizing sense that he is already out of time. It's been barely an hour, and the only sign that three men died on this street is a low nervous energy and the overpolished sheen of stone under the pound of sandals and market noise.

Easy to imagine it now: the infinite heads of Kosmos, everywhere at once. One here to scrub the stone, one biting down on a frightened child and mother, and one at Lagos’s ear, hissing, _please us, and we will not send you your son’s tiny hands in a painted box_ _._

Brasidas hitches up his shield, half-wishing for the anonymity of his crimson cloak, and makes his way back to the farmhouse.

It's as he left it, or appears to be. Doors broken where he broke them, tables overturned as obstacles and barricades in a marsh of debris and shattered wooden bolt-locks. Toppled stacks of books and palimpsests lie like splinters across the floor. An explosion of information - too many places to look.

“I am a genius,” he says under his breath, pacing the rooms and waiting for inspiration. “A prodigy and a polymath, and I have been blackmailed. I have a wife and a child, a family I love, and Kosmos will not tell me where they’re being kept - ”

No, something not right about that. You cannot beat Lagos in a game of information; he will read your eyes and your breath and spin meaning out of your silences, so Kosmos would not leave him a puzzle to solve. They would play instead with power. Lay bare the rules of the game, and make it clear that they can tip the board at any time and throw the pieces on the ground.

“I know where my family is,” Brasidas amends, and looks immediately towards the vellum map stretched across the wall. “I have known since they were taken, and keep it close to me - so that everything I do, everything I plan and calculate, has them at its heart.”

The map is a diorama. A living model of Lagos’s economy, an incomprehensible forest of tacks and pins stabbed across the dyed sketch of Arkadia: gold for arable land, purple for woodlands rich with forage, rich sable for quarries and mines. Some of them are linked by woolen strings in long catenary drapes, connecting regions, drawing routes and relationships…

Brasidas touches a finger to the map: _there._ Alone, pinned with a long brown hawthorn in a ravine halfway to Argolis, hangs a scrap of linen dyed daffodil-yellow, the color women wear in the heart of the Peloponnese. A fragment sent in threat.

If this were Kassandra’s, what then? If this cloth were the red of her _peplos_ ; if touching it summoned her smile and skin and the ferocity of his promises to her? If, trapped here in an office of war, he were forced to mark a hiding spot with a horsehair from her helmet, or the leather cord that binds her braid - could such a thing ever happen?

A wire, sharp and slender as knapped obsidian, closes around his throat.

White-hot panic. Brasidas lurches backward, away from the strangling edge, and his hands fly to his neck, digging desperately for leverage - but his back meets the hard point of a knee, and the garrote is thin, so thin he’d slash his fingers trying to get them between skin and metal. A thick snarl of wire presses into the knot of his throat, cutting, crushing, and the yawning void of headlock begins to daub at his eyes, bursts of nothingness and a sense of falling -

Then, the goatskin smell and scrape of burlap on his nose. The half-light of morning snuffed by something pulled rough and scratching over his eyes. What? Why this, why cloth over his head? Why not a sword to the spine, why not just pull the wire tighter and end it -

Oh.

The realization comes with a fading giddiness, a manic sort of fury. Of course they won’t kill him, not as long as they can manage it; why discard what you can use? Why make a corpse, when you can make chains instead?

Through the vertigo, through blackness blotting out his mind like fire-eaten paper, Brasidas searches for the weight behind him and digs deeper, hooking his fingers at last under the wire. He lifts his body against the knee at his back, puts his feet on the map - crushing pin and thorn and cloth under his sandals - and pushes.

They topple. Behind him, a high cry of surprise punctuates the wood-and-paper crunch of their fall. He rolls away and rips the hood from his head, the wire from his throat. The relief of air and blood fills him, and a dizziness like standing up too fast -

 _Do not fucking faint_ , he orders himself, and his vision returns in time to see a woman in helot’s rags launching herself at him with swords in her hands and an eerie apathy in her face.

Stumbling back for space, Brasidas levers his fist out in a sloppy punch like the swing of a scythe, and misses. Focus _\- focus -_ this outcome hangs by a thread, a man’s reach and weight are not enough to win _,_ you must think -

The woman darts forward out of a low aggressive stance, seeking gaps in his defense, and quite suddenly, Brasidas sees the echo in her. It’s not a Spartan style but a street-urchin style, a pidgin language of combat: movements cobbled together from chaos and necessity and stitched into a brutal pattern that he has spent the last few years trying and failing to decrypt.

He sees it in five, maybe six moves.

Retreat first; regain control of the space. When opportunity allows, search the ruined floor and bring up the first flat hard object you can find - a wax tablet, scraped clean - to blunt her swings and trap her next stab. Twist, then, to wrench the hilt from her hand and take it for yourself. Feign a mistake, a slip on paper underfoot, to put yourself on your back and draw her into a lunge, and swing the sword in a wild arc above you -

Kassandra would see that wide, messy movement as if he’d announced it. She would coil her body and stall her pounce, and tip her head to let the killing edge whisper harmlessly past her throat before falling like a star to pin him by the neck with her forearm.

(She might kiss him then, with the rush of her heart pounding in her mouth. A tease and a smile as she crushes their hips together and tickles his nose with tendrils of her wrecked braid: _maybe next time.)_

The assassin sways. She touches her throat with all the interest of an angler checking her fishing-line, and thick streams and gobbets of blood begin to run beneath her fingers like willow branches. She sinks to the ground, slowly, as if comprehending the situation moment by moment. Not once, with pink froth bubbling from her nose and lips, does that cold professionalism leave her eyes.

\---

The mark on his throat is so raw and risen by now that there’s no use trying to hide it from her. So when Kassandra sees him outside the cave-maw at the border of Arkadia, the place he marked and left for her in their dead-drop, Brasidas catches her flying hands and speaks first.

“Is it done?”

The crow’s tone of his voice makes her brow leap. Her fingers hover at his neck, straining to touch - held at bay more by his forbidding expression than by his grip on her wrists. Her eyes are drawn and harrowed, a powerful rage pointed inward. He feels the question on her tongue; she knows he’ll tell her if she asks. It’s simple as that, the agreement they have made: us on one side, and all else on the other, and never will that harbor be polluted by a lie.

 _Kosmos would make me an instrument of their power,_ he prepares to say. _I will not allow it._

_I will not be the fetters that hold the lightning. I would sooner die._

To his relief, Kassandra draws a clipped breath and asks a different question. “Does the person who did this still live?”

The low coiled note in her voice, just shy of a growl, excites as much as chills him. “She does not.”

“Her shade thanks you.” Kassandra drops her hands, as if willing the anger to drain out of them, and turns away.

Brasidas used to wonder, when she would lay against him with her lips at his throat, if this was a novelty to her. The pulse of mortal life, that rushing power suspended on fraying spidersilk. He thought it must seem a vulgar mystery to the god-born. Now he knows: there is no novelty, no distant curiosity, only a cold and helpless fear that the thread will snap.

“My part is done, yes,” Kassandra says, remotely. “My mother rides to Attika to stop the shipments. There were three tainted storehouses outside the walls of Tegea; I put them to the torch. Arkadia will struggle, for a time, but when the smoke clears, it will be free of Kosmos’s venom." She looks into the mouth of the cave, where its dappled grey ribs reach back into blackness. “Are you ready?”

Brasidas draws up his shield and spear, and steps into pace beside her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise this arc will be over soon!! also I've never uploaded from a phone before so I hope this doesn't result in a poorly formatted mess...
> 
> thank you all again for sticking with me this long, I so love reading all your thoughts!! <3


	13. eleutheria

Philonoe is not what Brasidas expected of Lagos’s wife, which makes him wonder what he was expecting, which makes him wince and focus on her voice filling the dark wet air after her last jailer dies on Kassandra’s sword.

“My thanks,” she says, as mildly as if they have come to collect her taxes. The corpses of her wardens lie around her, blood and brain dry-brushed on a sculpture of cratered helmets and torn leather. She steps over them.  

The peaks of her face stand sharp and hollow in torchlight. Her eyes are shrewd, her frame short and ample. Her spine is drawn up straight and steady as if threaded by a string, and there's a heron’s stillness in her head. Her _peplos_ is clean and creased and daffodil-yellow - unmarred but for a square cut from its sleeve that leaves a jagged trim like the edge of a sheepskin scroll.

For a foolish and flippant moment, Brasidas considers giving her back the linen scrap he took from Lagos’s map.

“I am lowborn,” Philonoe says, her tone transactional, perfectly and casually enunciated. “I have no noble ancestry, and my parents own no land or titles. I will not fetch ransom from family or patrons.” She glances toward the carpet of ruined flesh at her feet. “My husband might have paid you for my return, if you had not just inconvenienced his employers.”

“We’re not here for that,” Kassandra says quickly, appalled at the misunderstanding. “Your husband is Lagos of Arkadia, isn’t he? We seek no ransom; we only want to help him.”

Brasidas suspects that Philonoe’s eyebrows would have shot up if she were not so in control of herself. “You want to help Lagos.”

“Yes. We came to free you and your - ” Kassandra draws a breath and turns in a halting circle, searching the cave in muted alarm. “Your son, is he here with you?”

The question pours into raw silence like silver from a crucible, bouncing back at them off the glazed curves of stacked amphorae and gleaming lamp-lit stone. Philonoe levels her eyes at them, hunting for theater or artifice, for evil intent. If she were a snake, her tongue would have darted to taste the air.

Such similarity in that look! In that patient, measured tactic of drawing out your opponent’s words and waiting in silence for their mistakes. If Brasidas did not see their connection at first, he sees it now, in the way Lagos and his wife negotiate the world. A powerful and mistimed curiosity strikes: what habits will he and Kassandra grow to share? What secrets have they already told Philonoe with the way they move - as if tethered, given to touch constantly and absentmindedly, as punctuation or comfort - or how they stand together, each minding the directions the other cannot see?

Kassandra fidgets at his side. He feels her press forward, wanting to fill the silence, and ghosts his fingers along her back: _let me._ Philonoe waits with a fox's patience for Brasidas to play her game, to insult her with lies and tedious explanation.

Decline the grapple. Fight on your terms, not theirs.

“Your husband is dear to me,” he says plainly, speaking from the heart. “A friend from long ago, whom I have never forgotten. I could say I owe him my life. I am here to protect his family; nothing more.”

Philonoe jerks her chin over her shoulder. “Hide this.”

Kassandra releases a breath Brasidas did not know she was holding, and they begin to portion out the foul work. Fortunately, Philonoe’s cage has been gilded as befits an archon’s wife, so there is no shortage of wooden screens to pile the bodies behind, lambskins to draw over them, and cassia-oil perfumes to mask the stink of innards and evacuated bowels. Between them, as unbothered by corpseflesh as a career hoplite, Philonoe paces in the dirt and uses the toe of her sandal to cover the blood.

When they finish, she tips up her high proud chin and calls: “Niloxenos. _Meraki -_ Niloxenos, come out here, please.”

 _Meraki_ : the soul of your work, a life’s passion poured into your single greatest creation. A codeword, perhaps, to signal safety? With a rustle like a hare in reeds, a small brown figure comes obediently out of the dark, and Brasidas finds himself staring at a memory.

(No, not quite, he thinks after a moment of dazed silence - the boy’s clay skin is Lagos’s, his light eyes, but those high bones and shrewd hooded brow have a sharpness to them that can only be his mother’s.)

“My son,” Philonoe says, resting a hand on his shoulder. “Niloxenos.”

“Nilos,” the boy blurts, small-voiced, and tries to retreat behind his mother’s skirt. She stops him.

They are in the open now, the four of them, but still the air is thick and cold, clotted with mistrust. Brasidas approaches - one eye on Philonoe, watching for signs of upset - and crouches slowly before the son of his oldest friend.

“Well met, Nilos,” he says, and extends his arm in open-palmed welcome.

The boys of Sparta warm to this gesture. It’s a show of trust, an invitation to maturity: the soldier's bond they covet from the day they first watch their fathers go to war. Brasidas himself remembers the childish mimicries of the _agoge_ \- play-acting homecomings and ceremonies, each taking a turn as the victorious general buoyed on flowers and fanfare while the others clamor for a chance to touch his glory.

But the boy takes Brasidas’s hand, not his forearm, and pulls it towards him with wide-eyed zeal. He has seen no ceremonies, idolized no scar-torn generals. The rituals of war and manhood are as pointless and foreign to him as the waxy death they have hidden behind Philonoe’s painted screens.

“They’re rough,” Nilos says brightly, running his fingers over the hard skin of Brasidas’s palm and knuckles - small hands on large, a nearly comical difference. His smile is open and curious, lit with a trusting sort of joy that the _agoge_ blots away like spilled ink.

Brasidas chuckles, looking briefly aside at Kassandra (something unreadable on her face, a flickering weave of smile, frown, smile). “Yes, well - the work I do can be rough.”

“Are you a farmer?”

A quick movement of Philonoe's chin tells him that the truth will not do, so he settles for: “I am Brasidas of Sparta, and I serve the kings in the valley. Your father - he’s from Sparta, too, isn’t he?”

Nilos nods, though in the rough of his periphery Brasidas feels Philonoe tense at the question. He swivels on his calves, turning a palm up behind him: “This is my friend, Kassandra. My partner. We’ve come to take you somewhere safe.”

At his beckon, Kassandra steps forward and sits lightly on her heels, long legs folded beneath her in feline balance. Awe shines through Nilos’s eyes as he watches her - puzzling over her height, her edged beauty, the way the layered bronze panoply of her armor barely whispers against itself when she moves.

“Hello, Nilos,” she says softly, and Brasidas feels the warmth of her tone like a hammer to the spine. “I'm sorry we took so long. You must have been very frightened.”

“No,” the boy says, grinning, his proud jutting chin a charming replica of his mother, “I was brave, like _mater_ ,” and Kassandra’s laugh of delight spirals through the echoing dark.

Their geometry swims into Brasidas’s consciousness like a reflection on calming water. Crouched together before a bright-eyed child in an alliance of strength and comfort, soft-voiced, soothing: an alien configuration with too many meanings. He stands abruptly, nearly losing his balance, and earns a moment of Nilos’s disappointment before the boy fixes himself again on Kassandra’s smile.

“Brasidas,” Philonoe says softly, as if the name is an old stone tumbled smooth by riverrun. “I might have guessed, from your manner. My husband spoke of you.”

Brasidas tries not to watch Kassandra tidy the mussed shoulder of Nilos's tunic. “Kindly, I hope.”

“I was led to believe I might not have a husband at all, if you had not been with him at the _agoge_. So yes, kindly, I would say.” Her eyes gleam like an owl’s. “With some remorse, too.”

“Remorse,” he repeats with a frown, but it’s obvious, isn’t it? What else is a man like Lagos to feel, to think, knowing how many thousands of his own people he has killed or wounded? And beyond the grain, beyond the poison, the horrors he must have wrought since Kosmos crushed him under its thumb… “The Lagos I knew would be haunted by what he has done - even if he was coerced. I imagine it will take some time for him to forgive himself.”

“Mm,” Philonoe says, and then, trampling any further questions into the dirt: “We've wasted enough time here. If you mean what you say, then see us to the border of Korinthia.”

Brasidas catches Kassandra's eye over Nilos's shoulder in a moment of mutual confusion. “Wait. Now that we know you're safe, we can free Lagos from his estate. Listen - why don’t we bring him here, and you can all - ”

“No. We leave first.” Philonoe’s voice rings like the shatter of pottery. “I am taking Nilos away from the Peloponnese - ” ( _no, mater_ , keens the boy; she hushes him with a downturned palm) “I will pawn what I have in Korinth: my textiles, my ornaments, and what goods I can carry from this golden cage of ours. We will go to the north, through Makedonia - or by sea to Thrake, if a vessel will trade us passage for labor. I would make a passing seachart-reader, and my son is no stranger to hard work.”

There doesn’t seem to be anything left to say to that, so Brasidas trades Kassandra a faint and helpless nod. “What should we tell Lagos?”

“The truth, if you like.” Philonoe rests her hand on her son’s head, and he looks up at her with the pressed lips of a child who is trying very hard to be brave like _mater._ “My husband knows we will not be returning to Arkadia. We go with his blessing, and his love.”

There is more to learn, more to ask, but Kassandra speaks first. “Then we will help you go.”

The cave takes her voice and thickens it into an edict, and she rises swiftly to her feet in a susurrus of bronze and leather. Before Philonoe she seems a giant, a titan - war and wisdom in a body of marble - and yet Philonoe does not act lesser. “Take what you want from here; we will help you carry it. We'll find you a horse and cart, and see you to the border of Korinth by sundown. Once we know you are safely out of Arkadia, and not a moment sooner, we will go back for Lagos.”

And then she turns back to Nilos with that excruciating smile lighting her eyes. “Do you hear that, Nilos? No more caves, or chains, or soldiers in white masks. You and your mother can go wherever you want, and your father will follow.”

\---

With the year’s first winter chill settling in the air and sunset sheathing the distant pillars of Akrokorinth in a color like gorgon-coral, they watch Philonoe and her son disappear over the curve of the earth.

That odd feeling persists: a quiet humming edge brought on by Philonoe’s river-ice calm and a nervousness Brasidas cannot seem to explain to himself.  

“Your age, and a wife and son already!” Kassandra jokes, attempting to clear it from the air and bringing it back tenfold. “What have you been doing all this time, Brasidas?”

He laughs, and she laughs, and they look in opposite directions.

“They’ll do well on their own,” Kassandra murmurs. “She’s a cartographer; I could tell from the sketches she had me pack for her. There were diagrams of the cave, and of the Parnonas south of here. She’ll have no trouble finding work on a ship, if she can find one that will take a woman aboard.”

Brasidas imagines Philonoe in an angler's _chlamys_ , perched in the topsail of a fishing vessel with her charts and maps, daring the wind with her laborer's muscle and luxurious weight. Her son growing up sailor-strong, shucking barnacles from hullwood, his high voice thick with sea air and shanties. You could sing him a war song, a _paean_ , the sounds of Brasidas’s youth; he would not know them.

“How will Lagos find them?” Brasidas wonders, frowning.

Kassandra shrugs. “I would find you.”

The stirring of his heart at that is hardly new at this point, but still he loops an arm around her shoulder to pull her to him, crushing them together until there is no room between them for that stifling unease.

Her skin is damp against his. Hot with sweat, with the work of the day, and with the resolve to finish it. She hooks her arms around him, leans her head against his shoulder, and looks west towards the last arc of the sun, towards the columns of the archon’s estate standing like bones in the rust-dark distance. She holds her hopes in the set of her jaw - _people can go to evil, and they can come back from it_ \- and in Brasidas’s own ears ring the dreams he’s had, that restless voice he so wants to silence. Between them, light-eyed Nilos pulls at his mother's dress, saying _no, mater, let’s wait for him_ , and Brasidas wonders what Lagos would do if he knew all that he held between his thumb and forefinger.

Kassandra draws back. With her hands on his cheekbones, she looks into him for a long and quiet moment, and it has the feel of a stormfront.

“Come,” she says, and kisses the sense from him, and lifts herself onto her black-maned charger to lead them back to the city.

\---

The men they kill in the shadows of the estate flash by like dreams, like monochrome scenes on urns or tapestry: blood and skin and armor all the same in the dark. Lagos’s guards wear the dress of Sparta, chiseled cuirasses and hoplite’s helmets with shocks of horsehair and long red cloaks like the one Brasidas no longer owns, but it’s clear from the way they drop their spears to fight with daggers and venom that they serve a different master.

“Upstairs,” Kassandra hisses. Muscles stand like planes of granite in her arms as she lowers her mark to the ground; his helmet rolls off with an agonizing clatter and makes her wince. “He must be there. Quickly - ”

The sounds of organized panic slip through the halls like diving birds. Low voices and the rustle of armor follow them up the courtyard stairs, where they come eye to eye with a pair of sentries standing guard at what can only be the archon's bedchamber.

The sight of mouths wide, poised to report, brings the training forward: the spear leaves Brasidas's fingers without a thought, finding the bare hollow of one man's neck and clipping his shout to a choke. Kassandra follows, close enough to catch the weapon in flight, and crushes the web of her palm into the second man's throat. They fall together, lynx and hare, with a dull clang of bronze on stone.

“I go in first,” Brasidas says, and Kassandra nods once, handing him his spear from its bubbling well beside her.

Before he can lose his nerve, he puts a hand to the door and pushes.

Some things, of course, are the same. Those pouched eyes and wide flat nose, drawn down and inward like metal pulled by a lodestone, and a sense of infinite patience. But there are more lines now, more leather in his cheeks, and his body - hardened then by obligation, by the force of expectation and mockery - has become soft and indefinite.

Pig, they would call him in Sparta. Fat like a lotus-eater, like an Athenian. To Brasidas, who has met his wife and seen a love in her eyes that she took no pains to hide, he looks like a husband and father from a place where those words mean what they should.

“Lagos,” Brasidas says, and spills forward.

Lagos matches his step with a retreat, and levels the point of his sword at Brasidas’s throat.

Already that first hope shattered. _He will know me, and cry out in joy, and we will embrace -_

“Please.” Brasidas holds his weapons out in a gesture of peace, shield and spear spread like wings to expose his chest. “We’ll disarm. You keep yours.”

Behind him, as she wedges book-racks and wardrobes against the door, Kassandra makes an uneasy noise in her throat. After a moment’s bated silence and a pleading jerk of Brasidas’s chin, she lays her sword and spear at the doorframe and falls into place at his side.

“You're loud,” Lagos says, and the peace of his tone clashes with the readiness of his sword arm. “I never expected to see my assassins, much less hear them butchering their way up the stairs like starving wildcats.”

He smiles then, showing his teeth through his beard. “But I suppose the blame for that is mine. You would have learned from the best, if not for me.”

And then he lowers his sword and opens his arms, and a shock of relief rushes through Brasidas like the break of a dam. Barely thinking, he steps forward - disarmed, guileless - but stops short when he feels Kassandra’s hand on his shoulder.

 _Remember caution,_ she tells him with her grip; _we must be sure._ Lagos’s eyes slide between them, a mild and searching look.

“We’re here to free you,” Brasidas says. “Your wife and son travel north as we speak, to Korinth. We made sure to see them on their way before coming here for you.”

Lagos bends at the waist in a perfectly heartfelt bow. “I thank you for that, truly.”

A long, empty silence settles between them. To break it, Kassandra continues, pointedly, “And now, since they’re safe, you can - ”

“Please.” Lagos extends a hand, palm forward _\- stop_ \- and his smile looks brittle enough to shatter. “Let us be clear and communicative. I will not be going anywhere with you.”

“Your family is safe,” Brasidas repeats, as if Lagos simply has not heard them.

“My family will never be safe,” Lagos says placidly, “while I live, at least. But that is beside the point. The banner I fly belongs to Kosmos - the white mask, the snake - but the work is mine. I’m sorry to disappoint you, my friend. And your famous companion,” he adds, with a conspiratorial wink at Kassandra. “He does not live long who vexes the gods, I hear.”

 _Stop it,_ Brasidas demands silently, paralyzed. _Stop smiling, laughing. This is no time for jokes, for -_

Kassandra comes forward now, pushing past him into the guarded space Lagos has circumscribed around himself with his sword and demeanor. He does not defend it; the _xiphos_ hangs still as an ice floe in his hand as she approaches.

“Why,” she begins slowly, uncomprehendingly, as if speaking a new language, “would you serve Kosmos, if you were not being forced to? What are you thinking? How could - ” Her breath comes out in an incredulous cry: “The grain! Hundreds will die on the front because of what you’ve done. Not just soldiers, but their scouts, their slaves, the runners who bring them their supplies - ”

“Yes,” Lagos says with a terrible copper-fire calm. “Those people will die. And hundreds more, thousands more. Kosmos, you see, does not fight wars. It lies under them like termites, like tapeworms, and gnaws until the nations that started them are empty and bloodless and weak.”

Brasidas closes his eyes, so that he will not have to watch his friend speak. “Why would you want such a thing?”

“Because weak nations cannot start _new_ wars.” Lagos’s voice is deep and raw and sincere. “You think I want violence and conflict, that I thrill at the sight of blood? No. I only think that sons should not long to die, and that mothers should not long to lose them.”

Slowly, Brasidas begins to understand. Look into the future Lagos builds, and you will see no red and blue borders, no all-knowing owls or blood-slashed lambdas. No blind faith or vainglory, no state-starved children or infant bones piled at the foot of an old and bloody mountain. Only people, and their lives, and the families they love.

Voices at the door. The wood rattles on its hinges; the barricades quiver and hold. Lagos goes on bemusedly, looking sidelong at his walls of maps and pins as if he has not heard anything. “Sparta is a wild dog. Strong, but stupid. Athens has lived by that luck - by the fortune of architecture and geography, and by the stunning ineptitude of Spartan leadership.”

He turns his light peaceful eyes on Brasidas. “That luck will not last, I know. I cannot expect Sparta to forever be hamstrung by its old guard. In many ways, I have had to set my timeline by the pace of your career.”

Kassandra’s hand closes on his arm in horror. Brasidas feels flayed, a hot humming nerve exposed to the burning air. Dry-throated and raw-voiced, he rasps: “What have you done?”

“Balanced the ledgers.” Lagos extends a hand behind him, indicating his desks swollen with books and reed-pens and palimpsests. “A push, and a pull, where it had the most impact. A diet of lead for the infantry, as you know, to clip their heels and give Athens a fighting chance. And sea-fire for the Spartan navy, to patch the holes in their worm-eaten decks - delivered through spouts and bellows, through ceramic grenades. It slicks the water, you see, to keep it burning. Such simple genius; Daedalus himself would have trembled.”

Disappointedly, Lagos adds: “There might have been a play to unseat Pausanias, too, if he had not taken Phila and Nilos to try and control me. In the end, Kosmos elite are as greedy and anxious as any autarch.”

(Just like that: the fucking traitor-king laid before them like a libation. If they searched the room they might find writs and orders, papers sealed with Pausanias’s wax, the proof they have been seeking for years; Brasidas couldn’t care less.)

“This doesn’t need to be,” he says hollowly, as the voices build in the hallway. Another rough push at the door, another moment lost. “Even if the lives lost in this war buy the world you want, a world without Sparta or Athens, the cost is too high. Blood can’t be traded so easily.”

“Can’t it?” Lagos laughs, a humorless thing with an arctic edge. “Our kings trade it for land and glory. I trade it for a future. I defy you to find me a god who would not name mine the better cause.”

The noise outside is loud, distracting. They’ve gotten something to help them break through, Brasidas guesses hazily - a battering ram, or some heavy bludgeon. He can barely think. “Come, Lagos, please - come with us. Let’s talk somewhere else.”

“I thought I told you,” Lagos says softly, “that I will not be going anywhere tonight.”

A final jarring slam makes Brasidas's heart skip, and he whirls to the door - have they gotten in? He searches for his spear and shield - still on the ground, where he dropped them minutes ago -

And then a puff of air behind him, like someone breathing on his neck. A sense of movement, of impending impact.

 _No_ , he thinks numbly. _Let me go back. I want to do it over, to say the right things. To make him see and regret, and come away with us to fix what he's broken._

 _I cannot fail this. For Kassandra, and for Nilos, and for myself, I cannot -_  

He turns around, against his will.

The sword is slack in Lagos’s hand, poised at the arm-gap of Brasidas’s armor, aimed between his ribs, at his heart. The hard tip of a reed-pen protrudes obscenely from the hollow of his throat. Red pools at his collarbone, spilling over his chest, and a sick wet rasp bubbles out of him from some deep and wounded place. The pen’s split nib holds a trembling bead of blood - enough to write with, Brasidas thinks with a building hysteria; enough to sign an edict or balance a ledger, or write a letter to his son -

“I'm sorry,” Kassandra says with her mouth pressed to his neck, her voice a dry crackling whisper. Her hands are shaking. “I'm sorry.”

Not for the killing, of course. They both know it was Lagos’s choice, that he controlled the room from the moment they entered it. He saw the link between them, saw where her eyes and hands lingered and pulled on that chain like puppetstring.

He could not get away, Brasidas thinks in an empty howling void. He saw the trap of it, saw Sparta’s poison and and tried to swim away, but between that and the dog-jaws of Kosmos he was devoured.

I wanted him to be good; he was. He was the best of us, and still he lost.

What of me, then?

What of me?


	14. apophasi

Standing straight as a spear before the twin thrones of Sparta and only half through the accusation, Brasidas waits for the world to come apart.

 _Well done,_ Pausanias could say in that oil-smooth lilt, and snap, and arrows would fly out of the dark like fingers snuffing flames. The ceiling could cave, and through it would drop a hundred assassins, or writhing coils of snakes and scorpions, or gouts of sea-fire pouring down their throats and eating the air from their lungs. Or the traitor-king could smile and spread his arms in welcome - _ah, but you see, we are all children of Kosmos_ \- and he and Archidamos and the ephors would all turn on them with glittering eyes and daggers hidden in their gauntlets.

And even if not that - if not some terrible and serpentine plan falling into place with an evil snick like the lock of a deadbolt - then Brasidas expects a fight, at least, or a snide salute. _Glory to Kosmos_ , as they say.

But Pausanias only runs.

Not everyone, Brasidas reminds himself, is Lagos.    

Whispers around them, and strangled notes of confusion. He and Kassandra have read in turns from letters and palimpsests, narrating years of threats and encrypted commands, but the mute shock of the room tells him it may have been too much, too fast. In uneasy jerks like a door struggling on its hinges, the _hippeis_ part to let Pausanias pass, unprepared for the sudden and bewildering test of arresting their own king.  

Archidamos’s scream rises through the murmur. It jumps from wall to wall, splitting the air like a sharp hull, and he whirls on liver-spotted calves to rip the spear from the hands of his closest bodyguard. Before he can bolt outside, Brasidas reaches out and grips his shoulder.

“It’s best if you remain here, my king,” he says, earning a scowl fit to chill a caldera. With his other hand he gestures to his side, where Kassandra stood moments ago, where the lack of her has left a god-sized hole in the room. “Pausanias will not survive the night.”

A flash of so many things through those faded eyes. Hurt and shock and shame - _all these years, and I had no idea_ \- but above it all a hot, blinding fury held like a shield, because anger is comfort for a true king of Sparta.

Archidamos turns and launches the spear with an old and expert roll of his shoulder, and Pausanias’s throne explodes in a hail of marble figures and painted wood. His breath comes out in a roar, an infinite tirade, and the ephors stagger back bending and bowing as if sycophancy will smother his rage like sand. Brasidas, who cannot be bothered, clasps his hands behind his back and waits for the old king to calm down.

“We require a stable hand now,” he says when the dust has cleared and Archidamos has stopped screaming. “Kosmos has a far reach and a strong grip, but it's not too late to free Sparta from its influence.”

_If it should be freed at all._

“How the fuck did this happen?” Archidamos demands, jabbing a finger at him, close enough that Brasidas has to lean back to avoid being prodded in the neck. “Who - what is _Kosmos?_ How did Pausanias fall in with them, and when? Who else in Sparta is compromised - the generals? The polemarchs on the front?”

Patiently, Brasidas goes through it. A supranational organization with tendrils in all corners of Hellas and an interest in weakening Sparta and Athens to the point of collapse. Judging by his correspondences, Pausanias has been a an agent of Kosmos for seven years - nearly his entire tenure as king. Seventeen of Sparta’s active commanders are known intelligencers, and must be removed if there is to be any success on the front.

Archidamos swats at the air: _take care of it._ Several of his _hippeis_ disperse into the crowd. “And what of the archon? The regent of Arkadia, what was his - ”

“Lagos is gone,” Brasidas says flatly, so that he will not have to hear anyone else say his dead friend’s name. “I saw it. I was there.”

“And was he one of them? Did he betray us?”

Brasidas breathes in slowly, through his teeth, before speaking. “No, my king. The archon (hated your country with its bloodied teeth and vain ridiculous bodies, and wasn't wrong to. You would call him a traitor if you knew what he did. He wanted something better for this world than what you can offer, and he would be here, still here, if he hadn't) acted to protect his family, my king. He resisted as much as he could.”

“Then he succumbed to extortion,” Archidamos says thinly. “To ransom.”

Brasidas can see him preparing to black out Lagos's name and lineage with a single careless brushstroke. He feels the muscles jump in his hands, his arms, and holds them still and steady behind his back.   

Calm. Calm.

“I do not see it that way, my king. I might have done the same in his place. He (treasured them more deeply, more purely than I can explain. Do you know what it’s like to love without reserve, without expectation? Ah, but you only want to hear that he) sought to preserve his heritage. They threatened his only son.”

For whatever wretched reason, that satisfies him. Archidamos nods briskly, turns away, and lowers himself to his throne without looking at the ruins of Pausanias’s beside him. “You’ve done well, General. Sparta thanks you for your work.”

Brasidas would have warmed to that, once. Would have clutched at those crumbs of hard-earned favor like flakes of gold, and forged them into purpose.

“It was not just my work,” he says, with a tight bow that he hopes does not betray his temper, “and not just me that Sparta should thank.”

Courtiers and councilors melt away before him like spring ice as he leaves. Half their eyes are wide and wondering; the other half are downcast in deference. There is no hiding it now. _God-touched_ , they will say later in their homes, _he has her favor, he walks in the light of our protector and patroness_ , and it will diminish them both.

“The house is hers,” comes Archidamos’s voice behind him, following him out of the palace. “And her citizenship. If such things still interest her.”

\---

While they wait outside for Myrrine, Kassandra paces the grounds of her childhood home with lupine restlessness and shows Brasidas her memories.

The noble willow in the alley, which she remembers being twice as large. Here, the well she would fill with stones, convinced the underworld would send back gold coins and amethysts. The second-story window she would climb out of when she disagreed with her curfew, and the front yard where Nikolaos would train her (to show her off, she said, with equal parts pride and disgust). All here, and all hers.

“This was my life,” she murmurs, and sits on her heels on the weathered stone stoop. “It will begin to feel like home again soon, I'm sure.”

It never has, for him. Not Sparta, nor the palace, nor the apartment he reclaimed three years ago after a greedy glimpse of life outside it - but he keeps that to himself. Myrrine arrives, and they enter.

The rooms have been cleaned and kept, but there’s a smell in it like disuse, like must and stagnation. Kassandra stands here, then there, frowning as if trying to summon an emotion she has been instructed to feel. Myrrine moves from room to room like a ghost, running her finger along the walls and searching shelves and wardrobes for the remnants of her life.

“The kings said this property was given to your adopted brother in Nikolaos's absence,” Brasidas says, standing by the doorframe. “I imagine there will be some explaining if he tries to retake it.”

“My father’s angry pet son?” Kassandra laughs, not without fondness, but it sits high in her throat, and he knows her mind is elsewhere. “Fuck him. Three years in Sparta and I haven’t seen him use it. He can take it up with me if he ever decides to return from Boeotia. You can come in, you know.”

Brasidas doesn’t move. Both of them look to Myrrine, who has reclined in a leather-corded _klismos_ with a thick stack of sealed yellow letters and beckons without glancing up. Rolling her eyes, Kassandra goes to the head of the chair and bends down to kiss the top of her mother’s head. “We’re going upstairs, _mater_. I want to see what Stentor has done to my room.”

“Mm,” Myrrine hums, and squeezes Kassandra’s wrist. “You go ahead, lamb. Brasidas will join you soon.”

Outside Brasidas’s apartment, feral cats will sometimes gather to play with an old leather horse-lead left tied long ago to a post along the promenade, batting it back and forth with teeth and claws as if rehearsing their hunts. He has never felt more like that piece of string. Across the room, Kassandra raises her eyebrows at him and disappears into the courtyard.

“I’m sorry about the archon,” Myrrine says, surprising him. “I heard what happened after I left Arkadia. They talk of it in the streets, everywhere I go. Or, at least,” she adds, turning her gold eyes on him, “they talk of what you told the king this morning. I suspect the truth differs slightly.”

 _Don’t want to talk about this, not to you, not now._ “I told Archidamos what he needed to know. The truth would serve no one.”

That mild look, perfectly sympathetic - as if they are discussing a disappointing crop yield. “It did not happen as you hoped, then. He was too far gone.”

To her credit, she does not add: _as I told you._

“I don’t regret trying,” Brasidas says. “Never, as long as I live, will I regret it. Lagos deserved my faith, just as your son deserves yours.”

An instant of raw surprise in Myrrine's eyes, tucked away just as quickly. With a movement of her chin that might be a nod, she leans back in her chair and draws her legs up beneath her dress, looking as comfortable in her home as Kassandra looked misplaced.

“These are all mine,” she muses, leafing a thumb through the pile of letters in her lap. “I wrote them from Argos, from Korinthia, even from Keos and Naxos. Not all of them in anger, though Nikolaos must have feared as much. He did not open a single one, but kept them all together, in the vase where we once hid our love letters when Kassandra grew old enough to read them.”

She turns over the first of the letters and slashes its crumbling seal with the nail of her thumb, and Brasidas could swear he hears a mote of warmth in her chuckle. “I will not begin to guess at the meaning of that. Go and be with my daughter, General. I trust that you, at least, will open her letters.”

“I hope that she will not have to send them,” Brasidas says, and excuses himself with a bow.

\---

In one of the bedchambers upstairs, he finds Kassandra sitting on a low bronze-framed bed with her eyes closed and her legs crossed as if in meditation. The braziers in each corner, recently lit, spit embers and slow breaths of heat, but the warmth is superficial. If this room was once hers, all that made it so has been stripped away. It looks like a cell, or a soldier’s garrison: spare and anonymous.

“You're alive,” she says with a wry and distant smile. She splays her hand on the bed before her, and they sit face-to-face with their fingers twined together on the cushion of her lap.

The gulf between now and then seems unbridgeable. A week and three days of worry, of combat and travel, of nights spent close and flushed by the fire, watching the stars with his head pillowed on her breast without so much as a word about it. But then, quietly, she asks “Why?” and Brasidas is back in that dark and suffocating room, kneeling in his friend’s blood while Kassandra grips his wrists as if trying to break free of a nightmare.

“He wanted his family safe,” she murmurs, her gaze low and unfocused as shadows through glass. “That much I understand. With him gone, Kosmos has no need of them. But his mission, the work he was doing - why didn’t he stay and finish it?”

“Because, I think,” Brasidas says slowly, “he already did.”

Kassandra looks at him in alarm. “What?”

“Your mother may have stopped one of Lagos’s shipments, but how many came before it?” He searches his memory for the scraps of news he’s heard since their return: reports delivered by breathless runners and mumbling generals hoping to conceal their failures. “Sparta has lost seven skirmishes in as many days. Several of the _lochagoi_ challenging the Long Wall have been killed in their camps. Our commandership on the front has always been disorganized, slow to adapt; it will take months to rebuild the offense.”

“And the sea-fire?” Kassandra breathes. “The weapon that would make Daedalus tremble?”

“Knemos and Alkidas spoke of it at war council,” Brasidas says darkly. “There have been tests off the shore of Methone. It coats the water in oil or naphtha, and burns fathoms out, for hours, from the shore to the horizon. I’m told you can hear the marines’ shouts of joy from the beach.”

Kassandra’s breath hisses out like the tear of paper. “He wanted Pausanias gone, too, didn’t he?”

A tumble in Brasidas’s stomach. Yes, of course - Lagos said as much. It was the cause of his family’s imprisonment: the reason he needed to be restrained. Despite Pausanias's goals, his alignment with Kosmos, he wanted the glory of winning, and pushed Sparta towards victory whenever he could. He fell prey to patriotism, to his violent blood and the flaws of his upbringing, and thus betrayed Kosmos, whose mission is to purge those flaws from the world.

And so Lagos erased him.

“We had no power in that room,” Kassandra says bitterly, her every word like the snap of a lash. “We have none, even now. He moved me like a puppet - do you remember? He saw my fear and pressed on it, like a wound. He got everything he wanted, and we got - what? The privilege of wondering whether Kosmos has a fucking point?”

Immediately, Kassandra’s jaw snaps shut. The heat seems to drain from the room. She watches Brasidas in silence with eyes wide and hawk-sharp, searching his every breath, his every expression, for -

For what? Disgust, horror? Agreement?

What would it be, he wonders, to let Sparta fall?

A powerful conditioning tightens his chest, grabs at the treasonous thought as it claws up through him: let the warriors die, let the machine wear and weaken. Let the palace crumble, and its kings with it. Let the people grow weak under siege, and escape through cracks and fissures like refugees at the sack of Troy.

At the end of it, the world will go on. The moon and sun will continue on their tracks. The waves will strike the shore, and lightning will batter Taygetos like the hammer of a god. Beyond this cistern of rage, of battle-blood, life will continue.

One of them should say say something, Brasidas knows. Should break the spell on them and silence Lagos’s placid voice on the air, saying _sons should not long to die._ He prepares to suggest they go outside, or ride to the river or spar out their frustrations, something to distract and disarm, which is why he is astonished when what comes out instead is: “Let’s run.”

Kassandra’s eyes grow wide and bright as waxing moons. The shiver in her stirs the air.

Fool, Brasidas thinks - what are you doing? What of your people, and your duty to them? What of your promise, _I will not be the fetters that hold the lightning_ \- remember? But it was in him like a whipworm, aching to tunnel out, and there was no stopping it, _is_ no stopping it: “What has Sparta done for you, Kassandra? What of value has she given you, truly? Has she honored you, or fought to keep you? What loyalty has she shown?”

“None to me,” she says slowly, quietly. “But for you: a home, and laurels, and power that grows every day. You cannot just ignore those things.”

“What good are laurels or power if they will not let me fix what is wrong? No - ” and he takes his hands from hers to touch her face, to feel the warmth of her cheek and the fine lines of her jaw. “I want something else. A life of peace, of obscurity. A home that is truly mine. A bed of warm furs, and hands that are rough from farming, and a soft body like Lagos’s - ”

 _The people that will die,_ hisses a small voice, deep inside. _The chaos you will leave behind, the snakes that will breed without her here to cull them._ _The slow and hideous burn of all the lives this war will devour before it is done_. He clenches his jaw and pushes it down.   

Sighing, Kassandra leans into the cup of his palm. Her honey eyes are dark and thick and inscrutable as thunderhead. Slowly, over what seems like hours, a smile grows on her scar-slashed lips, cast gold and dancing in firelight.

“I admit,” she begins, finally, “I will be sad to lose this - and this, and this - ”

Her hand moves across him. Slips down his shoulders, his arms, presses on the hard crags of his stomach through his _chiton_. His skin prickles where her fingers have been.

“But,” she says, and her palm comes to rest on his heart, “I think it will be a fair trade.”


	15. oneiro

On her first day in Sparta, Kassandra interfered with an _agoge_ training exercise and, given the opportunity to apologize for visiting eternal shame on the boy’s family, broke her accuser’s cheekbone.

It was the natural thing, she says. There was a wolf, a wild hungry creature, and a child in danger - and though that child was armed with shield and weapon, the artery in his thigh had been torn out and lay like thin branching lightning-scars over the pavement, so obviously he could not defend himself.

This, to Sparta, was the highest shame.

She tells him this in front of a headstone in the foothills of Taygetos, half engulfed by brush and rubble. The child lived a few months more before he was killed during a training exercise. His trainers buried him here in the mountains where he fell. He was mocked, they said, for his lame leg and for having escaped his first death like a coward, and so he sought his second with single-minded focus.

 _A good son,_ reads the epitaph - this, and nothing else.

“Of course that's all it says,” Kassandra mutters, and Brasidas closes his hand on hers to stop her from chewing her nails bloody. “What else did he have time to be? What else did they offer him?”

A rash of orange in the sky now, casting bright feathers over the remains of last night’s rainstorm, drawing temples and houses and seaside cliffs in black like puppetry props. They have been awake for hours, hunched through the night over sheepskin maps and wooden pawns, talking around it as if the words do not yet fit in their mouths. The lack of sleep has given Brasidas at once a thundering headache and a lovely sense of weightlessness.

The valley looks ablaze. Like a vast ocean slicked and sparked with Knemos’s new war-toy, stretching from horizon to horizon and washing the city in cleansing fire. Through joy and pain and Kassandra’s thumb rubbing lines on the bones of his hand, Brasidas imagines the two of them free, laughing, turning away and leaving it to burn.

\---

The change will take time, of course. Nothing so stark can happen all at once. So Brasidas allows the ephors to send him again into their theater of war, into Megaris and Euboea and the Aegean islands, where he watches and learns and teaches Sparta’s young commanders to be quick and unpredictable, and collects victories as if gathering shells on a sandbar.

For her part, Kassandra develops a curious intensity in her work. The map in Brasidas’s apartment becomes a living thing, an ever mutating list of leads and targets, each with its own notes scrawled in her indecipherable hand. He begins to think of it as a catalog of all the good she needs to do before Kosmos is no longer her concern. Month after month he watches them fall, and watches new ones bloom in their place: an Attikan quarrier and his mountain-dwelling slave-army, an information broker pawning secrets in the smoke of Megaris, an Argive banker who bleeds his city to stuff Athenian coffers.

Always, they return to that torch-heated hill at the foot of Athena's temple: the seat of their defiance. He kisses her sun-singed brow, and she sketches the new scars on his ribs and arms, and they talk of what they’ve seen and done in low quavering tones as if savoring the last bites of a meal.

It seethes like a pyre between them. _When we are finished here, we will go_ : a seed of heat kept breathing in a mound of greying embers. They look to the seam of the horizon as a promise, as a path. No more does Kassandra bloody her knuckles on the faces of child-killers, and no more does Brasidas bristle and frown at every general who counts his worth by the skulls his spear has pierced, for they know that there is an end to it.

“Well,” Kassandra laughs, “an end to our seeing it, at least.”

A flinch goes through them, because those two things are not the same.

“Let’s follow them,” she says abruptly, to chase the thought away. “Phila and Nilos, I mean, to Makedonia. I’m tired of mixed wine, and this heat!”

Brasidas laughs at the hushed eagerness in her voice, as if speaking it too loudly will burst some fragile shell around them. “You’ll like it there. The trees will be red and gold by the time we go. There may even be snow on the peaks. I’ll make you a _sarisa_ for hunting - the tallest in the north - and wine as strong as you want.”

“Why stop there?” The brazier’s popping heat gleams in her eyes. “Why not go farther, past what we know? Into Aigyptos, or Babylon, or whatever is beyond that? A new thing to see every day, a new person to meet or thing to learn…”

She adds vellum to the atlas that night, extending it in sprawling triplicate: past Anatolia in the east, the Ionian in the west, Thrake in the north.

What does the coast of Oinotria look like, she wonders - the vine-covered lands settled by the princes and grandsons of Arkadia? What of Persia, the gold-limned empire that killed her grandfather, with itwo concentric temples and bas-reliefs and spear-carrying shock troops dressed in jewelry and vivid patterns?

They fill her maps with scraps of knowledge, bits of legend and hearsay snatched from explorers and bards. Brasidas dozes off to the scratching of her reed-pen as she imagines all the terrible, wondrous things they might find, and wakes to her voice asking:

“Are you afraid?”

She’s beside him now. Her head is pillowed on her arm, her hair tangled across her shoulders and her pupils blown in low light. The cloth of his sheets creases around her, drawing her body in linen and lamplight, and the intimation of shape and curve makes him reach for her in the dark.

“That Sparta will chase you,” she continues, afterwards. “That she, or whatever cryptarch holds her leash now, will not let you go. Are you afraid?”

Brasidas chuckles, and it rumbles against her ear on his chest. “I might be, if Sparta were better at waging war.”

It’s bluster, of course, and the crease in Kassandra’s brow shows that she knows it.

“I will not let her take you back,” she says, quietly. “Do you know that?”

She climbs atop him, the press of her thighs a calming weight on his hips and stomach. Her hands come to his jaw, one on either side, and he can see their fear reflected, compounded in catoptric infinity in her eyes. “I will stand with you, always. I promise you that.”

\---

When the Hyakinthia comes around again, the men of Sparta brawl in the streets for the chance to challenge their patron in the game of the gods.

“It will happen by lot-drawing, as it always does,” Brasidas says with amusement as they walk to the acropolis, past flashing shows of muscle and tendon like gears glittering in sunlight. “They bruise each other for nothing.”

“They do it for attention,” Kassandra scoffs. As they walk, she looks carefully forward, minding the direction of her gaze. A scrap of stray regard will only encourage them. “And pride, which is not nothing, to them. Come - I wouldn’t want to be late to my favorite annual celebration of death.”

“Of love,” Brasidas counters, and she rolls her eyes.

“I suppose I've been harsh on these festivals. They’re fine - they bring some kind of joy to this place, and the races are fun.” Walking beside him at shoulder’s length, like a colleague, she smiles and discreetly touches his elbow. “You have been the best part of each of them.”

“I remember,” he teases. But it's true: it would be difficult to forget her eyes on him for the first time, that heated thrill rushing down his spine like vertigo. “How will you manage to outdo the last one?”

Her smile turns wicked at that, a quick and gleeful flash of teeth, and the _salpinx_ sounds twice to signal the beginning of the games.

In the dense and dusty heat of the arena, Kassandra stands with her chin tipped high in lazy disregard and awaits her challengers. Officials attempt to speak; they are drowned instantly in the roil of the crowd, in its wild screaming adoration.

Months ago, Brasidas muses, she would have looked on that worship with hatred. She would have turned her back to it, and scowled into the thunder-crash of her people’s love like it was suffocating her. Now, she floats above it as insects skim the water, watching and smiling with a sphinx’s amusement.

Celebrity is like so many things: bearable, if you know it is temporary.        

At the call of the referee, Kassandra strips to her _strophion_ and wrestles six men to the ground in a handful of brutal grasping moments. Five seconds for the first, eight for the second, and four for the rest; one by one they fall beneath her, levered and twisted and pinned to the sand like shrike-skewered insects, and stumble off purpled and groaning to nurse their bruises.

From his vantage point in the amphitheater, Brasidas watches the boxer-dance of her feet and calves with rapt focus. He rarely sees her arts from this distance and from this angle, like an anatomical sketch: impossibly quick, blinding as sunrise, but _scrutable_ , somehow, like a new language slotted into place over years of learning.

Whether by luck or design, his name is drawn next. He steps down to meet her.

At the first shrill of the war-horn he bursts forward out of his stance, opening combat on his terms. He attacks high, as if seeking a grapple; Kassandra sets her torso sidelong, planning her riposte, and meets him with both arms to blunt the downward strike -

But there is no downward strike, only a slipstream rush of air as he dips out of the motion, drops into a crouch, and launches his shoulder into her ribs.

It draws a cry of surprise from her, and from their ring of spectators. He feels her weight shifting, fighting for leverage, but it’s too late: he circles her with his arms and lifts her up, and forward, and down to the sand.

She’ll flip him, of course, once she lands and gets her breath and realizes he’s grounded her. He’s ready for it, for the pincer of calves around his waist and a movement faster than he can see that levers him to the ground, and braces his back against the sand. As she darts in for the joint-lock, for the pin and victory, Brasidas hooks his knee around the back of her neck, throwing her forward and off him.

He rolls back on his shoulder. They stand apart again, crouched, ready, and he thinks with savage satisfaction that Kassandra’s smile could light a forge.    

She takes the next round with a powerful flat-footed kick that knocks the breath from him, and he the round after that with a leg-hook and a lucky feint and a knee on her chest. Finally she slips under his arm and scales him like a vine on a trellis with a _klimakismos_ , a ladder trick, bringing him to the ground in a tangle of leg and wrist and creaking joints.

Breathless, he points up in pride and surrender. Kassandra bounces to her feet, pulls him up, and - surprising him, as she seems to do every day, every moment - keeps pulling him forward and off balance until he stumbles into her, and her mouth is crushed against his, and the blood rushing in his ears is almost enough to drown out Sparta’s disbelieving roar.

The heat in her does not set with the sunb. When the feasts are done and the laurels distributed and the city’s lanterns doused for the night, Brasidas demands a rematch, by which he does not mean a rematch at all.

“I will see your hair grey,” Kassandra murmurs, smiling down his chest and stomach, and he winds his fingers in her hair and shivers. “I will see your skin withered like olive-bark, your eyes white with cataract. I will know what it feels like to hold your old body, all bones and sinew, and to have a life’s worth of laughter between us - ”

It's too easy, in these moments, to draw deep gutters in the world. Her on one side, the side of safety and peace, and the rest on the other, braced to attack.

“Wait - ”

Her hand is on his chest, her thumb at the hollow of his throat. There's a storm in her eyes, that quick and troubled calculus that always makes Brasidas want to ask what she is thinking.

“I’ve had no silphium this week,” she says.

Silphium and wormwood: the draught she buys in batches from the druggists in Pitana, a silvery stuff with a scent of fennel and poison. The implication twinges like an ember, a strange rushing in his throat - different from lust, different even from the great drowning love he feels for her. It’s a clutch of his stomach, a yawning possibility: small hands on large, marveling at their roughness.

An expression on her face that could be longing, or agony. For a breathless moment, it feels as though she will bend down and kiss him anyway, and they will slip past it as a ship by wrecking rocks -

But then that old word, _safety_ , familiar and galling as a scar. That sense of spears and swords on all sides, waiting for weakness; of snakes in the dark, searching for ever more ways to hurt and threaten.

Lagos in their ears like a siren call, saying _my family will never be safe._

Slowly, Kassandra settles beside him and presses her lips to his neck, to that old fading line Kosmos left on him all those months ago. Brasidas folds her in his arms, and they lie inscribed in each other, thinking too much to speak.


	16. pragma

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hope you love military logistics!!

The letter arrives in the fall.

He finds Kassandra pacing it on the floor of her apartment with her thumbnail in her mouth and worry written on her brow. She glances up when he enters, and smiles quickly and faintly, and then her eyes go back to their darting pattern: back and forth in a pendulum-swing between parchment and the morning sky outside her window.

“Your thumb,” Brasidas reminds her. With a soft but impassioned curse, Kassandra removes the ragged red nail from her mouth and stows her hand behind her back.

He scans the letter as he approaches: thick high-quality calfskin, immaculately rolled, sealed by a bead of lapis-blue wax pressed flat with ribbed feathers and wide owl-eyes. Unmistakable, if only by the defensive prickle it raises on his neck - a feeling like the urge to block a punch. “From Athens?”

Kassandra looks down at the letter as if it might hiss at her. “Somehow. Last I was there, it was nearly impossible to send post outside the city.”

“Your contacts there are influential, from what you've said.”

“In their own circles, but enough to defy military law? They must have spent a fortune on runners and smugglers to get this to me.”

Privileged intelligence, Brasidas notes idly. To be confiscated, analyzed, distilled into data and forged into battle plans and pressure points. Things that would have mattered to him a year ago. “Have you opened it?”

Kassandra draws a breath, settles on her calves on the floor, and breaks the seal.

It's encoded, naturally. A shift-cipher, by the looks of it: a basic character-substitution technique using a keyword or phrase known only to the sender and receiver. Sparta’s spymasters consider this more difficult to decrypt than a _skytale_ , although Brasidas has found that a frequency analysis - or simply a glut of free time - will break it just as quickly.

He looks up to find Kassandra watching in smiling silence with her chin in her palm. “What?”

Laughter glimmers up through fingers splayed on her lips. “Only hoping that wherever we go, there will still be puzzles for me to watch you solve. Anyway - you said something about a keyword?”

She likes to compliment him this way: stealthily, from the flank, to see the color rise in his neck. He will not take the bait. “It’s like this.”

Brasidas scrounges for supplies in the wreckage of her room - a pen from the foot of her bed, an inkpot and scraps of papyros from a cluster of overturned worktables in the corner - and then sits opposite her and prints two alphabets on separate sheets of parchment. “The shared word tells you the rightshift: how many places to move the characters” - and he slides the second paper below the first, lining up _alpha_ with _rho, sigma_ , then _tau -_ “so that each letter corresponds to another. Once you have the decryption key, the rest is just matching and transcription.”

Kassandra leans back on her fingertips to study the ceiling. Her lip catches between her teeth in an endearing sulk. “Then I need to think up whatever word my friend might have used to make this key? Gods help us. I haven't seen or spoken to him in years, and even if - ”

And then she sits forward with a long-suffering smirk, equal parts pique and affection. “Why.”

Brasidas pauses. “Well - because, as I mentioned - ”

“No.” She laughs and slides the diptych of parchment towards her. “ _Why_ is the keyword he would use. A good question, he likes to say, is worth a hundred answers. I find that most people cannot stand him.”

With that she takes up a pen and parchment (and a tendril of hair to occupy her mouth, knowing Brasidas will complain if she chews her fingers to bones), and sprawls across the floor to work by the morning sun through her bedroom window.

Letter by letter, the shapes of disaster unfold before them.

_A plague has come upon us._

_It is like nothing before. Quick fever boils under the skin, leaving wine-dark lesions and streams of blood from the eyes and ears. Nightmare images, loathsome as any oracle’s ravings, like a true curse of Apollo._

_Thousands dead already. Columns of corpse-smoke on every corner, and phlegm and vomit in every home. Soldiers are everywhere, brutal silent warriors in bone masks, and a terrible killing animal they call Deimos -_

“You can’t,” Brasidas bites out, immediately, pointlessly. “A plague? No. Athens has pulled all its people inside its walls. There’s hardly room to walk, much less breathe. Sickness will eat through it like fire.”

His words brush the back of her neck and fall away like almond flowers.

“You would go,” Kassandra says, almost apologetically.

There’s no answer to that. Taking care not to show him her eyes, she brushes her lips over the scarred mess of his knuckles, and departs that evening with a newly whetted sword and a month’s provisions in her saddlebag.

That panic finds Brasidas in war council too: _something is happening in Athens,_ a humming gossip that fills the air with a fear of pestilence and lung-rot. Soldiers once garrisoned behind the Long Wall are leaching out of it in great frantic clots and camping outside, on the sieged plains. Merchant vessels and mail clippers are being turned away at the port, and entire flotillas of triremes will hover aimlessly in the open sea rather than put in for supplies or shore leave.

Smoke has begun to rise from the heart of the city. One pillar first, then three, then twenty, like the coal-black masts of ghost ships.

“We strike now,” Archidamos booms, clapping his spear against the palace floor with a bone-rattling echo. “Our enemy is weak. Her ports are closed, and her men limp like lame dogs. We will end her reign, and avenge the slaughter of our brothers. We will write the sack of Athens in the heavens with her own heartblood; we will paint her ruin across history with our fury. She will bow and beg before us - ”

It’s like the screeching drag of metal on marble. A painful shriek in his ears, one long unending flinch. Such an obscene waste of breath for a man so grey; must Brasidas listen to this? Must he really stand here, blind and dumb in his soldier’s pose, nodding and barking bloody assent like a beaten dog?

 _No_ \- and the realization comes to him like the first breath after a long dive. He has power now, power given by small defiances and large victories and Kassandra’s golden glow on him at the Hyakinthia, and power means controlling a room, means exerting your will on it and knowing it will bend for you.

Ignoring a look on Archidamos’s face that is helpless and irate and so _very_ old, Brasidas steps out of formation, leaves the palace, and goes at last to the warfront.

\---

This is his challenge: the final puzzle he will solve for Sparta. The Long Wall of Athens, which at first glance must be an illusion, or a scene from a myth - because how could a thing made by mortals be so immense?

It seems infinite: a sprawl of coarse limestone and pale baked brick that stretches from city to port. Its gatehouses, tall and tight as ancient cypress trees, have not stood open in years. It is as wide and daunting as the ocean, and clings just as close to the horizon. You cannot stand far back enough to see both ends of it.

Smoke rises above the acropolis, and there is something mythical to that, too, Brasidas thinks - a tale of reversal that almost seems engineered. Athens intended this to be their haven: an island on land, the city itself an impregnable fortress. When the war began they collected all their farmers and shepherds and herbalists into the metropolis for protection, and so outside on the plains there are only trampled fields left, only house-frames, broken scythes, oxidized screw-pumps, half-buried mule skeletons, and weathered mounds of poros where retaining walls once stood.

Now only the worm-eaten hulls of vast communities whose people fled to what they thought was safety.

Sparta’s war camps are scattered and communicate poorly, which is the first of what Brasidas assumes will be many problems. They sit in a snaggletoothed crescent around the Long Wall, ringed with furrows and tall jagged palisades, and they have not gained ground in months.

Every commander gives a different reason.

Here on the north edge, they are too far from the supply line and suffer from weapon-rust and underfeeding. Down in the midfield camps, Athenian raiding parties have taken to guerrilla strikes - coming in the night to steal supplies and slaughter warhorses, and disappearing into the hills before a defense can be mustered. Near the port of Piraeus Brasidas finds _lochagoi_ locking horns like rams, sparring pointlessly for war prizes and authority while their camp-commander fumbles with nimble Athenian marines that harass their flanks from the shore.

The tools are here - a foothold, sturdy fortifications, and well-trained men who will do as you say if they think you deserve respect. But only when properly applied will they do the job they are meant for.

First: the bloat. Six camps of six hundred men each will never be well managed, and so Brasidas sections them into wings captained by their sub-commanders, each with its own logistics and procurement agents to keep it armed and watered and fed, and its own elected peace officers to settle disputes (the _lochagoi_ in the south camps complain; he tries at first to explain the value of impartiality in conflict resolution and then wrestles them to the dirt to avert a brewing mutiny). A swift and agile messenger relay - drilled to perfection and equipped for redundancy - will ensure that Brasidas’s orders are never more than an hour out of sync.

He sets traps for the raiding parties, ambushes for the marine shock-troops. Within a week, each camp hosts several hundred blue-thoraxed prisoners of war, each of them groaning _the city is ruined_ or _masked soldiers in the streets_ or _every fourth soul is sick or dead or burned -_

They have starved so willow-thin that their bonds nearly slip off their wrists. With acid in his stomach and a queasy mantra of _do this now, and never again_ circling him like a lamed osprey, Brasidas barters them food and clothing for the weapon he loves most, which is information.

The offer barely leaves his lips before they are telling him anything he wants. Where the remaining defectors have made their raid-camps, which of the Long Wall’s gatehouses are hardest to defend in times of siege, and where near Piraeus there might be cracks, or cellars, or secret passages fit for amphibious assaults...

Like talc crushed in his fist, the last of Athens’s wheezing resistance on the plains crumbles into rout. A savage cheer drums the air over the camp-crescent, and the news goes back to Sparta in a hail of horn-blasts, and Brasidas’s life would be so much simpler if this sort of thing gave him any pride at all.

\---

In the fifth week, white ash begins to pour from the sky.

Panic burns through the camps. It jumps from man to man as easily as plague itself, causing them to scatter and tear at their tongues and cover their faces with their cloaks. It takes several blasts of the _salpinx_ and Brasidas screaming himself hoarse atop a watchtower to restore order.

The rumors say it’s a dying attack. That Athens saw the ruin perched at its door, and that its clever cowardly tacticians turned its pyramids of poison corpses into a weapon as light and inescapable as air. A clever theory, if it were possible; Brasidas summons his wild-eyed messenger corps and breathlessly dictates _there is no danger, the burned remains of the dead cannot spread disease,_ and faithfully they carry his words through ash-caked hills.

Still his heart leaps at every stitch in his chest, every catch or prickle in his lungs.

“Four days of fever before the bleeding begins, and seven before seizure and death - that’s what the prisoners have said, and they have lived it. I think we would know by now if the corpse-dust were deadly.”

This from one of the younger commanders, a dark wiry _lochagos_ who has volunteered to help organize the ash-cleaners, the newest of their camp specialists. And he looks familiar, Brasidas thinks - staring, trying to place it - _so_ familiar, but the name simply will not come to him…  

“Lysander,” the man says, mercifully, and grips Brasidas's forearm with an obviously performative strength. “Son of Aristokleitos. I am honored.”

Those bruised cheekbones. That spark like a signal fire in his dark-circled survivor’s eyes. “We competed at the games last year,” Brasidas realizes.

Lysander favors him with a tight, but not entirely humorless, smile. “I would not call it that.”

“You’re a commander now. A _lochagos_. That is not easy, even for a Spartiate, and - am I mistaken? - you are not one. How did you manage it?”

“Resolve.” There’s an element of defiance in Lysander’s short bow. “I am a helot’s son, yes. I was born in a field to a family that had nothing. My mother and father were possessions, while they lived. I have fought with everything I have in order to be here, before you, General, in the armor of this station.”

_Why?_

It takes him a moment to realize he’s asked it aloud. Pulling tight his mask, which has begun to slip, Brasidas adds, “What I mean is: why here, on the front, and not with one of the navarchs in the Aegean?”

“Because I swore to my father that I would lift his name to the stars, and to my mother that her blood would stand beside the greatest warriors of our time.” Lysander grins, shark-sharp and appetitive and keen to please, and it reminds Brasidas so terribly much of the way he once looked upon the old king of Sparta. “History will be made here, General. No man has drawn half the blood you have.”

A perfect, accidental punch to the stomach. Victory in two rounds: a swift answer to last year’s humiliation.

“Fight well,” Brasidas says, his voice as steady as he can make it, and flees to his high center camp to be alone with the ash and stars.

He does not sleep that night. It’s too hot, and too wet from the winter rain that has just begun to soak their tarps and groundcloths, and far too full of thinking.

 _Why?_ The question was not answered - not the one he truly wanted to ask. A helot’s path to freedom is punishing, engineered by the state to be as expensive and deadly as possible, so why endure it only for this: only to wear heavy armor that chafes in the heat, and to live on as a dented helmet or some stray jet of artery-blood staining a battlefield? Why break your body to escape the trap of your birth when you will still be a prisoner in the end?

How can a man like Lysander not see that the freedom dangled before him - the thing he has chased with all his fire and fervor - is no freedom at all?

“Brasidas.”

He whirls, wide-eyed in the dark. Searches for the shape of her in the corners of his tent, and finds nothing. “Kassandra - where - ”

He finds her standing outside, on the lee of the craggy whaleback hill that points towards Athens. Distant pyres and frail city lanterns round her edges in soft red, and through her breathing he can hear the hollow tap of the rain on her breastplate.

“What happened?”

She doesn’t answer. There’s a foreign scent on her - the usual iron and weapon-oil mixed with earthy petrichor, and beneath it an acid foetor that burns his nose and fills him with the terrible urge to run.

Brasidas moves closer. “Kassandra - ”

“No,” she says, and steps back with her hands splayed in warning. Her heel sinks into a puddle. Her voice is thick and charred. “Stay there. Don’t - it’s still on me, I need to wash.”

“You’re _being_ washed. Come” - he retreats into the tent, beckoning - “I’ll stay here, on the far edge. Please, just come out of the rain and tell me what happened.”

Her lip, red and swollen between her teeth. A faraway shock in her eyes, and a rough cut to her shoulders. The things that make up Kassandra seem suddenly misaligned, like a complex mechanism with a missing geartooth that jerks and judders and carries on regardless.

 _Plink, plink:_ the rain on her armor.

“Stay there,” Kassandra says, slowly, “stay, and _do not_ touch me,” and steps inside.

He lights braziers so that they can see each other, and sparks the firepit in the center of the tent. She stands on one side of it and he the other, and he waits in silence for her to be ready.

“Athens is,” she begins -

And then she stops, and begins again, “I found - ”

Again: “He was - ”

And then she shakes her head and lowers herself slowly to the ground, and Brasidas bargains down the urge to leap across the fire.

“So many dead.” Her voice skims the patter of rain, low and dry as fire-crackle. “So many that I had to help burn them. I had to carry them from the temples where they prayed for their health, and from their homes, if their children were too young. It’s in my nose, my hair - I can’t get it out. Do you smell it?”

“No,” Brasidas lies. “Did you find your friend?”

Kassandra barks out a bitter laugh that nearly makes him jump. “My friend, yes. I saved him, got him safely out of the city. A few others, too - I put them in carts and on boats, whatever I could manage. And then, every time I turned my back, Kosmos and its soldiers and its caged disease slaughtered a thousand more.”

Knowing he should not ask this: “What of Deimos?”

She looks down at her legs and wedges her hands in the folded crook of her knee. “I found him,” she says simply, and the dead ice of her tone creeps through his veins like an urchin sting.

“You did everything you could,” Brasidas offers - because she did, he’s sure of it - “You went when they asked for help, and saved what people you were able to. All those lives cannot be in your hands.”

“All those lives,” she repeats, low-voiced. The fire gives her eyes an eerie shifting depth. “All those lives, _all_ …”

Brasidas fidgets on his side of the tent, shifting from one leg to the other, wringing his hands. He is so perilously close to judging the risk of blood from his ears a fair price for holding her.

“Athens is not a good place,” Kassandra murmurs, “I’ve always thought so. It’s a stage for demagogues, for tyrants who rule with personality. Women are kept inside, out of sight, like you would keep a dog, and though the slaves are treated better in some places, they are still slaves. There is no freedom in Athens, only performance.”

She looks back over her shoulder - into the white rain, into the city she has just fled, as if forcing herself to acknowledge it. “But those people… those blacksmiths and money-changers and dyers and druggists - all the bodies I burned - they are not that decay. They were only trapped in it.”

There: the answer Lysander did not give to the question Brasidas did not ask. The man's bright-toothed grin comes into his mind like lightning on Taygetos: all that grit and power, that unity of purpose, wasted on clawing his way from one pitfall to the next.

 _Why,_ Brasidas wanted to know, _why would you fight so hard for this_ \- as if it were not obvious.

Lysander will die when they storm Athens, probably, by spear or by sickness. In the end, he will be another life, another good man, swallowed whole.

That tightness in Brasidas’s chest again - when did it happen last? Yes, that’s right - the first time he thought of freedom, of escaping and letting his city crumble into its own foundations. He thought it was conditioning, chains of grooming and learned obedience tugging on his neck to keep him loyal -

But it’s not, is it?

It comes to him with a pressure-pop like climbing high or diving deep. The thing blocking his path, which hangs like lead weights on his ankles - the reason he did not leave last year, or last month, or right now - is not obligation, is not a harness to be thrown off and escaped.

It is love.

Kassandra’s fingers curl in her lap. “I want to go home, Brasidas. I want to wash the death out. I want to sleep in your bed, and think of something other than the sound of a slashed throat - please.”

She reaches for him over the fire. “Will you go home with me?”

\---

If they strike:

A quick victory and a clean surrender. An entirely manageable number of casualties. The sickness, which did not spread through ash, will come into them instead from the water and the air and the corpse-sludge in the gutters. Spartan hoplites, and then Spartans at home, and then all their neighbors and allies and trade partners, will bleed from their eyes and ears and die in agony.

If they disengage:

Athens wastes, becomes a thin coughing ghost of itself, but does not disappear. When all those who can die have died, then the survivors - the people who have developed immunity - will rebuild. The war will go on for years, or for decades, and men like Lysander will worship men like Brasidas, and throw themselves into open flame to burn their names into eternity.

Lives on all sides. Why does Brasidas hold the reins? When was _he_ given the single stone that tips that scale from one side to the other?

“To breach Athens now would be death for us,” he says to the men gathered in his tent for a final war council. “If we touch it, we will take it on us. The plague will be on our skin, in our breath. You, and me, and all the men in your command: if we do not fall here, then we will bring the fever back to Sparta, and our families and children will die, too.”

An uneasy shuffle among the commanders gathered in his tent. Silently, their eyes search each other through their battered bronze helmets. They all want to agree; none of them wants to agree first.

“We withdraw,” he says, and the room bends for him.


	17. arete

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> due to a combination of personal turmoil and snowboarding trips, please forgive typos or grammatical errors in this chapter. thank you for reading and I love you all 🙏🏻

The oral historians of Sparta have never sung a story that did not have a spectacular ending.

A wailing keen as the enemy is ground like petals into the dirt, or the fall of a great city into dust and memory. Three hundred men standing against a thousand immortals and dying on their feet with Persian steel in their bellies. Defeat, too, is acceptable, so long as it fits the meter.

There are no stories about walking away from a battle you have neither lost nor won. Without looted treasuries or glittering carts of war-prizes or columns of prisoners weeping in their conquered rags, there is simply nothing to talk about.

The army walks discordantly. Without the focused march-beat of a _paean_ , their steps seem random, uneven: like a fleet of unmoored ships bobbing and bumping each other in a crowded harbor. Thin-lipped, the commanders offer Brasidas a horse at the border of Megara (we leaders all ride, they explain, to act quickly in case of ambush), but he declines, so that he might walk in the mud with the men he has betrayed.

Favor bleeds out of him with their every thundering footfall, their every night spent listening to the rain in bewildered silence. They move around him like magnets near a lodestone: push them too close and they will leap from your hands to avoid contact.

It’s fascinating, truly, how easily the luster fades (he thinks this with a grim sort of scientific interest, like watching a fig decompose in the heat). How quickly his horde of goodwill - all those bits of legend and competence he has invested into his reputation over the last five years - vanishes down into the soil like ashwater.

“It was the right choice,” Kassandra says on the fourth day of the march, when the first lights of Sparta begin to appear through stacks of mountain cols and thick anvil clouds.

She has walked at Brasidas’s side, in the open, since Attika - a conscious choice, since he knows she prefers to set her own pace and travel by dark. A ghostly curve in her lips tells him she is making every effort to smile. He takes her hand and looks away, so that she will not feel like she has to. “I know. But thank you for saying it.”

Nothing he does will make her tell him what she saw in Athens.   

The moment his column crosses into the city, a _hippeis_ escort converges on him, crowding the streets with their stamping huffing chargers and metal-fringed pteryges. After a stiff greeting and a cursory attempt at chasing Kassandra off, they usher the two of them through streets full of murmuring children and wide-eyed women, under the squawking spiraling paths of winter birds overhead and into the heart of the city.

In the palace, Brasidas stands before the single throne of Sparta with his commanders and captains serried behind him. Kassandra looks askance at the first ephor who asks her to leave, and is not asked again. It goes by like the drone of a hive: introductions, words, bowing, what feels like dozens of announcements. Finally, the herald finishes his report of the army's last days on the front, and Archidamos scowls at Brasidas as if trying to scorch him from the earth.

“You seem to have forgotten your purpose, General,” he growls, fingers pressed white on the arms of his lonely chair. “I sent you to take Athens by force. To stamp out the last miserable traces of their greed, and win this war for your homeland. Was that not clear?”

In a carefully crafted performance of inattention, Archidamos shakes his head and leans back in his throne. He sighs, angling his body and gaze to the side as if considering other options at a market stall. “Thousands of men would have killed for the honor I gave you - and would have finished the task. Perhaps my trust was misplaced.”

A beginner’s strategy: casting blame like caltrops into a crowd of peers. Weaponized disappointment, meant to strike you in the wound of your ego.

Brasidas has many wounds. More, probably, than any man in Sparta - hundreds, thousands, all of them in the heart, so deep that they may never scar over - but ego is not one of them.

“Your forward camps were full of rowdy children,” he says evenly. “I turned them into an army. I took a thousand prisoners and gained their secrets. I made more progress in two months than your commanders did in two years.”

He turns now to craft his own performance, looking out on a crowd of dark and shining faces in the wings of the palace and saying clearly, loudly: “I withdrew so we would not bring home the plague of Athens. So that when we win this war, my homeland will still exist. The decision was not made lightly. If you would have made a different one, my king, then we are lucky you were not there.”

He does not need to look at Archidamos’s face to know that it is pale and drawn. Paralyzed with the same ancient sluggish rage that allowed a poisoner to rule at his side for seven years. This, Brasidas realizes, is the greatest danger to his people - not democracy or enemy war bands or the looming specter of Athenian imperialism. Even the snake-heads of Kosmos cannot hold a candle to this man: to his fury and bloodthirst, and all it blinds him to.

“Moreover,” Brasidas adds, and catches Kassandra’s eye, “I had Sparta’s weak to think of. The first to die, as I understand it, are the very young - and the very old.”

That, at least, gets a smile out of her.

\---

The map in Brasidas’s apartment - which he liked to imagine clean, marked only with empty pinpricks to remind them of a time when there was work and danger - has bloomed in florets of red cloth like a field of anemones.

How many agents of Kosmos has Kassandra found and condemned since they returned from Athens? Hundreds, at least, though he would never have the time to count; every month seems to bring a new crop of linen on lambskin, each a new head to be taken. She marks them and studies them, and Brasidas passes her what information his network can provide, and she leaves by foot or horse or chartered ship and returns with fragments of masks on her belt and blood under her fingernails.

Before, she sought the leaders alone, leaving their officers and adjutants to scatter in their wake. Now, they all must be purged, for any root left unpulled will grow.

The thing she will not tell him sits under her skin like a splinter. Her smile returns, week by week - that sly scarred chest-swelling grin, perfect as a drawn bow - but with her ghost-glazed eyes it forms an unsettling mosaic: a folded page with _before_ on one side and _after_ on the other. She pulls away by pulling closer, drowning questions with kisses, and when they fuck it’s dramatic and desperate and anything but comforting.

“I don’t know,” she says, when Brasidas asks when the death will stop. “I don’t know that it can, or should.”

Why will it not close? That gap between them, cold as winter foothills. He buries himself in the sweat-smell of her skin, pulling her so tightly to him that her breath rushes out and her heart quickens under his ear. She rests her chin on his head, and drags her fingernails down the back of his neck, and _why, why won’t it close_ -

“Either I kill to cure the decay,” she murmurs, “or I watch while it grows and festers and swallows more cities, more lives. To see that something is wrong, to have the power to change it, but to do nothing - I think that must be true evil.”

\---

Over the next few months, Brasidas finds himself sinking to the waist in spy-work.

The position of Sparta’s spymaster is his again, and as far as he can tell, it’s meant to be a punishment - the best Archidamos can muster in the aftermath of Athens. This is a magnificent misread, and a breath of relief: he prefers to manage information, not men, and the quiet of an office is a welcome change after the tangled chaos of war and generalship.

Without a vanguard, the currents of war have become unpredictable. No longer are Spartan forces deadlocked in Attika, fighting an unwinnable battle against mortar and stone; instead, they move in fractured columns through Megara, Phokis, Achaia, fighting skirmishes with Athenian reserves as their commanders nervously skirt lingering rumors of sickness. On the shores of the Peloponnese, defense forces repel the fragments of the Athenian navy, orphaned triremes that beach and strike and flee back to the sea in pathetic clusters.

Quietly, across the isthmus, Athens burns the last of its plague-carrying corpses and struggles to its feet.

Brasidas’s mind works constantly. Teems at once with a thousand ideas, long-term and immediate and subtle and bombastic, and as many self-rebuttals. There is work within the work: plans not of conquest, but of transformation. If Kassandra works to cure the decay of Hellas, cutting Kosmos out like gangrene to free the innocents trapped inside, then Brasidas will do the same for his people.

Think boldly, and without reserve. The king is the center of it; why not start there? He has shown time and again, over years of foolish orders and cries for war, that there is no peace in his heart, only venom. While he lives, Sparta will not soften. Remove him, and perhaps the rot will follow.

But no - Archidamos did not create this mess, any more than a newborn child creates her own ancient lineage. Like Nikolaos, like Lysander - like Myrrine - he is water drawn from an old and murky well.

Deeper, then.

A decisive loss for Sparta, to break its fangs at the roots and dull its appetite for war. Brasidas rules now with information; he can just as easily distort it. Feed it slowly or incorrectly to the commanders and navarchs, and they will muster at the wrong battlegrounds, march into ambushes, find themselves prisoners and bargaining chips. The proper deception at the right time will give the war to Athens, and the proper negotiations in the aftermath will ensure that Sparta’s people are kept safe and placid and disarmed.

No - his chest aches at that, too. Not from duty, but from the wrongness of it. Trading one corruption for another - is that the answer? Is it not better to win the war for Sparta, to influence Archidamos’s successor, and to change it slowly, from the inside?

But then there is Deimos, the weapon of Athens, who will not let it fall without a fight Brasidas cannot win…

He runs out of parchment. Fighting down the urge to overturn his worktable and all its futile designs, Brasidas stands, whirls, finds a sheaf of paper peeking out from underneath his bronze-framed bed and crouches to pull it out -

Maps, plans. Ink and charcoal on faded lambskin, the worst calligraphy he has ever seen. A dreamer’s notion of a world outside Hellas, overturned and pushed aside like ruined sheets.

 _A new thing to see every day_ , she sighs in his memory. _A new person to meet, or thing to learn…_

Blinking away a stinging pressure behind his eyes, Brasidas douses his braziers, leaves his apartment, and nearly collides headlong with a palace messenger hovering outside his door.

“You are summoned to the palace, General,” says the man, breathless in his sweat-soaked _chiton_ , with a bow that betrays a vibrating nervousness.

Brasidas cannot help the leap of his eyebrows. _General_ again, after months as nothing more than Brasidas of Sparta. “What for?”

“There’s fighting in the west - a battle coming, they told me, a massive one - but I should not say. I’ve also been instructed to summon - well - ”

The man glances downward with his hands clasped in deference. A gesture old as the gods.

“I’ll bring her,” says Brasidas.

\---

When he goes to retrieve Kassandra from her house, Brasidas comes instead upon a conversation not meant for him.

The scraps of their voices are audible from the _oikos_ , and grow as he approaches. Through the courtyard, up the steps to the second story, around the balcony - _mater, listen,_ _tired_ ,  _no._  

_Deimos._

He pauses with his hand on the wall and - knowing he should not - listens.

“His name,” says Myrrine, coolly, “is Alexios. He is your blood, and mine. He is the last of our family. Calling him that ugly name only pushes him farther from us.”

“Not as far as it should.”

Kassandra now, with cold fire in her voice. “Stop this, _mater_. Stop asking me to bring back something that does not exist. Fucking Hades, I wish you had been there, that you had seen it. Of all the people your son killed in Athens - of all the men and women and _children_ \- “

Here her voice snaps tight as a forestay. She pauses, as if to steady herself, and then: “Perikles, the statesman - did you know him?”

Myrrine waits before responding, as if suspecting a trap. “I knew of him.”

“He was old. Older than Archidamos, and weak, even before the plague turned him to scraps of himself. By the end, you could see his bones through his skin. When Deimos opened his throat it was like snapping a dove’s neck. He dragged his fingers through the blood, and drew it like ash across his mouth, and _smiled_ \- ”

“Kassandra.” Myrrine’s voice stabs through the room, high and strained. “That’s enough.”

“He watched my face, _mater_. He wanted to see me break. He wanted me to know that whatever I touched, whatever I loved, he would take away.”

Myrrine’s voice is thin now, nearly pleading, and it feels utterly wrong. “That was not your brother. It was the monster he believes himself to be. It was the evil they put in him - ”  

Brasidas flinches even before Kassandra’s voice rises like the burst of a seafire grenade. “Those things are the _same!_ Can you not understand that?”

 _Stop_ , he begs silently. _It’s too much. Your mother is down and bleeding. Leave it._

Kassandra, mercilessly, through her teeth: “Your son is gone, _mater._ They hollowed him out and put chaos inside. Looking at him is like looking into Charybdis, into a great swirling nothing. You want me to save him, always to save him - _why?_ You don’t know what he is. You know nothing of him!”

“I knew nothing of you,” Myrrine says, desperately, and Kassandra hisses out a chilly breath, “but you came back, and here we are. We have retaken our country, our home. How can we stop now, when we have rebuilt so much of what we had?"

“What _you_ had,” Kassandra snaps, and the bitterness in it drives needles through Brasidas’s chest. “Alexios is not the last of your family, _mater_ \- I am _._ Why can’t you be happy now, with this? With - ”

 _With me_.

“I am.” Myrrine fights for even footing, a forced and frantic calm in her voice. “Lamb, I am happy, of course - ”

“I lost someone in Athens.”

A moment of lurching freefall. Brasidas should go; he should not listen. He should let her speak, let her have this to herself -

“She was dear to me,” Kassandra continues, her tone strangled and quivering on a knife-edge of frenzy. “Precious like a sister, or a daughter - as real a love as I have ever felt. If that girl came back to me - alive, somehow, though I closed her eyes myself, and heard the silence in her chest - ”

A choke comes into her voice. She stops, breathes, continues. “If she were to come back to me, no matter how long from now, in what circumstance - I would think of nothing but her happiness, her safety. I would love every moment I had with her. And I would never ask her to do what you have asked of me.”

A chair scrapes across the floor. Fists on a table, rattling glass and pottery. If Brasidas did not know them both, he would think they were seconds from trading blows. “Enough of this. I did not raise myself a fool, _mater_. If I see him - if he threatens one more thing I love - I will kill him.”

And then her footsteps are thudding hard and fast towards the door, and she rounds the frame with enough force to knock him over. Brasidas steps back, and she catches herself on the wall, and he feels her eyes fighting to slip away: to look at the floor, the wall, the sky through the wide courtyard aperture - anything but him.

But they do not wander.

“I shouldn’t have listened,” he says.

The breath Kassandra draws is broken but steady. “I shouldn’t have kept it from you.”

“What was her name?”

Tendons jump in her throat. She raises her chin, sets her jaw. A few moments of whipcord silence, and then she says, with barely a quaver: “Phoibe.”

A girl Kassandra loved. Who could have been her family, if she had lived. A soul devoured by Kosmos while the people who might have saved her laughed by firelight and dreamed of freedom.

Brasidas will never meet her.

“Phoibe,” he repeats, softly, and hears the shape and sound of a daughter in his voice.

Kassandra sways, shudders. Grimaces, with her teeth clenched and her jaw rigid. The ghost-glaze of her eyes becomes a grief as fierce as fire under water, and she falls into him with her mouth open in a silent howl, and it feels like touching her for the first time.

\---

The rocky strip of Pylos, a miserable crescent of sand and forest off the coast of Messenia, has been garrisoned.

The peninsula is guarded by its own hostile beaches and mountains. Palisades stand on all sides: cliffs as tall and steep as beech-trees, with knife-sharp rockfall all around it like lionfush spines. A natural fortress, which some clever Athenian navarch has turned into a perfect honeytrap.

 _We are coming to take a forward position_ , they announced with their arrival, their loud fortifications,  _we who you thought sick and dead and over with. We will take your western coast, shed our ships on your beaches, dig our heels into your land, and march on your city -_

And Sparta panicked and leapt, for the threat was not only to its borders, but to its pride.

“My navarchs are weeks away, in the Aegean,” Archidamos says, pale as marble. “My generals are losing ground - driven farther back into the island every day. If Athens takes Pylos, it will be a day at most before they reach our borders.”

Brasidas looks around him, at the fear and thinness of the palace crowd. “And what would you have me do?”

“Please,” Archidamos says - and there’s something unnerving about the plaintiveness of it, as if he is wheedling some stubborn and petty god - “Spartans are dying.”

 _People are dying_ , Brasidas chooses to hear, for that makes it clearer. People born to violence, who have fought all their lives and think themselves free. People who do not have dreams of a different future, or eyes that see the movements of a battlefield like strokes on a canvas, or a goddess for a lover to stand with them in defiance.

Myrrine was not quite right. Brasidas is the flame without heat, the thing Nikolaos could not be. Peace _is_ in his blood.

Running is the thing that is not.

“He will go,” Kassandra says, her voice rich and hollow as a bone-flute. Her hand goes to its old spot at the small of his back, and when she looks at him, there is something in her eyes that is deeper than the ocean and hotter than the sun. “We both will go.”


	18. metis

“Tell me the variables,” Brasidas orders, and his officers lay the board before him.

In the north: the headland of Pylos, where three hundred Athenian marines and their general have debarked and dug in and drug their ships up through the sand to weather a long and brutal siege.

Pylos itself, a rocky horn of little economic value, an unsettled promontory bounded by high sharp cliffs that barely want fortifying. Piked palisades on three sides, with bowmen and peltasts packed behind them in tight deadly lines.

The fourth side, the south coast, which he might have named the perfect beachhead: weak and poorly defended.

(Why? Brasidas calls for a caliper, and measures out the channel, shore to shore - ah. Barely the length of a footrace, and too narrow to unload more than one ship at a time, leaving the beach easily defensible against an amphibious approach. A solid play, which he might have made himself - but set that aside, for now.)

The water, which will be their theater of war. Channels, bays, the open sea: an arena Sparta’s rowers have sailed since they were boys. Seafire, trained to skillful use, and no shortage of narrows in which to fight, where there is little room for flanking and ramming, where the distance between ships can be closed quickly and triremes driven ashore. Enough advantage to suggest victory against a smaller, weaker fleet.

The Athenian response force, which is anything but small and weak, reported leaving Zakynthos two days ago with flotillas of privateers and mercenaries at their flanks. Their expert oarsmen, who carve the water as sculptors shape marble, and their golden prows, which rip small slow ships apart at the belly.

And then there is Thrasymelidas, the acting navarch, and his strategy - if it can be called that. He has crowded forty galleys into the bay, stationed two hundred hoplites on Sphakteria, the slender jagged island just south of Pylos, and called for siege engines and architects from the capital. All to support that perennial Spartan favorite: a naval battle they might only win by an act of the gods.

The map, the currents, the pieces. Their placement and inertia, the things already set in motion. Their morale, which can be changed, and their exhaustion, which cannot. All of these things, these inputs, yield…

Brasidas braces through the cold clench of his stomach. His knuckles tighten on the crate serving as his war-table. The eyes on him are suddenly stifling; he feels bare and exposed, like the object of a prank.

The battle cannot be won.

Pylos will not fall, by land or by sea. The rowers of Athens will fill the bay with broken Spartan hulls, and the hoplites on Sphakteria will watch with helpless fury as they are stranded, pushed inward, and flanked. It’s obvious - can they not see? No - they mustn’t, or they would not have put him on this boat, would not have sent five ships swollen with elite soldiers from prestigious families just to fuel a pyre -

Dumb stares across the foredeck, waiting in silence for the thunderfall of an easy solution. The galley bucks underfoot, thrown by a wave, and a shower of red pawns rolls to the deck. Around him, officers scramble to retrieve them.

He needs space. Solid ground, and time to think. He looks up, searching for safety, and - through the clot of men clustered around him - finds Kassandra’s eyes as if drawn by golden thread.

She leans against the forward rail with her helmet tipped back and her armor sharp and bright in the sun, an image of careless power at the prow like a red-bronze temple icon. At his look, she lifts her hand from her sword and passes it by her face, a discreet letter _nu_ under her chin - _mind your expressions_ -

\- and smiles, warm and trusting as summer waves.

The salt of sea-spray fills his nose, and Brasidas is startled to find it calming. He straightens, releases the crease of his brow, sets his jaw firm and neutral and strong.

Remember - what is true evil? To see something wrong, and to have the power to change it, and to do nothing.

“We will take Pylos,” Brasidas calls over the tear of the ocean, “before the Athenian navy arrives. We will do it so quickly, so decisively, that Thrasymelidas will not get his battle in the bay.”

He pushes five red pawns to the south beach of Pylos - Athens's naked flank, blissfully unguarded. Unprepared for this, a thing no Spartan would ever do. “Prepare the ships to run aground.”

\---

Slowly, cautiously, Sparta approaches the south shore of Pylos, ship by ship in the snaking narrows of the Sphakteria channel.

Athens waits on the beach, silent and arrayed as if wrought in stone.

Standing at the port rail, flanked by marines with arms linked and shields raised, Brasidas counts a hundred hoplites arranged in a phalanx ten men deep, with archers and peltasts drawn and ready behind them. Their strategy is clear and traditional, and poached from Sparta herself: from her decades of defending beachheads from Athenian marines, of swarming debarking soldiers while they flounder in the tide and taking their shields for trophies and raw metal.

When Sparta’s galleys list in the shallows, as close as their deep keels will allow - as their marines leap from their decks to seek dry land and good footing - the arrows and javelins will fly. Half the men will die then, pierced through the gaps in their armor like speared fish, and the other half when the hoplites advance. To win, all Athens must do is wait, volley, and pick the bones clean.

But Brasidas's ships do not stop in the shallows.

A chorus of shouts rises from below, cushioned in the shrieking drag of sand and rock splitting on sharp keels. Brasidas hears fear in it, and bewilderment, hears them thinking: _is it a mistake, a miscalculation?_ The foredeck quakes as ship meets earth, leaping up beneath him and nearly throwing him from his feet.

Beside him, with an owl’s stillness in her head and torso, Kassandra puts a hand to his waist to steady him. His marines - shield-locked and clasped at the elbows - pitch, sway, and remain standing.

Two galleys breach, then three, then all five. Blood under the ships: the phalanx's unlucky vanguards, too far forward to escape, crushed between sand and heavy oak breakwaters. Athens clambers back, away from black hulls buried like marble-eyed hatchets in the flesh of the beach, and the first panicked volley darkens the sky like ashfall.

“ _BRACE!_ ” Brasidas bellows, raising his shield above his head as Kassandra loops her arm around his shoulders and pulls them down into a compact crouch. “ _BRACE UP!_ ”

The shout carries. A great synchronized shift, told by thundering footfalls on hollow decks, as his marines retreat from the rails and crowd together in tight low circles. Five ships of red shields turn towards the sun, and a hail of arrows and javelins glances harmlessly into the sea.

Under Brasidas’s own shield: Kassandra, close enough to tickle his ear with her breath. One hand on the back of his neck to pull them tight, the other clasped around his shield-arm, adding her strength to his brace. Her scent in his nose, sweat and iron and the lye and leather of her hair. She draws back and looks him in the eye, and the motion and madness around them at once seems slow, distant and utterly unimportant.

“I love to watch you,” she murmurs, a bare and honest truth. “You were made for this.”

Brasidas almost flinches. She knows better, surely. Knows what he thinks of this, of his own gifts, that unwelcome talent he wishes he could barter away for something better -

But there’s no shame in her voice, no apology or accusation. Only understanding, and a deep pride that swells his chest with a terrible mistimed longing. _You are what I was made for_ , he wants to say - but before he can draw breath for it, Kassandra dips down and kisses his jaw and leaves the harbor of his shield.

Marines around him, clamoring for orders. Brasidas comes to his feet with blood pounding in his ears. “Rise. Wait for my command. Wait.”

He raises his spear high and to the side, a battle-signal that means _hold._ Across his galleys, his soldiers bristle at the rails: ready to leap, to conquer. He looks to the front of the ship, and nods, and Kassandra - swift, blazing, breathtaking Kassandra, with her wind-raked braid and horsetail crest whipping about her like Gorgon hair - throws herself from the prow.

Churning and chaotic as its archers muster for another volley, Athens stops to watch her. She plunges toward the beach, a fall the height of seven men, and lands low and tight on her calves, her heels dug deep in the sand and her sword and spear splayed like viper fangs in her hands. With her chest forward in a sprinter’s lean, she drums her weapons on her breastplate, bares her teeth, and roars a long tearing note that startles seabirds into chittering flight and raises the hair on Brasidas’s neck.

Do they think of her, he wonders, as he thinks of Deimos? The weapon of Sparta: a thing you cannot escape or defeat, but must instead plan around, as you would an earthquake or avalanche?

The archers and peltasts scatter. Hoplites fall over themselves in their rush to flee behind their makeshift barricades, to seek safety in the thick forested heart of the headland. Brasidas gives the signal, and his marines fill the sand, and the beachhead of Pylos is won.


	19. erebos

Metal screech. The quake and creak of low wet land under iron and leather. The hollow ring of shield and helmet. A snarled knot of shouts and orders pushing up, laddering each other into the air like startled gulls. Thick brush and tall trees creaking, crashing, lit by the hiss and spark of seafire grenades - these are the sounds of Pylos.

Past the palisades, the sky: a red void heated by corpse-fire. Instinct would make you turn your head up towards it, seeking the cool and clear as if surfacing from a dive; you would find none. All of it seems ablaze, fork-tongues licking the air from an open wound in a sea thick with rust and ashfall. It is not clear the time of day, or that this can be the same earth on which there is sun and life and silence.

Inland, Brasidas coughs smoke and clutches at control.

His throat is torn from shouting. Bruises on his back, his knees, his shield-shoulder where he has bull-rushed hundreds of men to the ground. Dark blood and the blackened char of slashed bowels have swallowed the _lambda_ on his shield.

 _We should_ _have_ _withdrawn_ , he thinks, every part of him calling alarm - unable to banish that howling regret, visions of going back, moving a different pawn in a different direction. Hundreds of better decisions he could have made: land in Messenia, fortify the isthmus, dig in for a landward defense. Force Thrasymelidas to abandon his stubborn post in the bay, to debark his marines and fortify the south shore of Pylos. Better yet, spend this time organizing a retreat and regroup instead of this mad rushing advance -

And then his line reforms, his shifting fragments of order and discipline, and the battlefield falls again into his hands.

Remember. Breathe in the chaos, regret if you must, but remember: on the water Athens may have teeth that rip and rend, but on land they are the hollow-boned galley, and Sparta the steel-jawed monster of legend. So does it swing in his heart like a pendulum - hope to despair to a fearsome blood-pounding pride as his army moves through trees and brush-fire in measured segments like stones across a river.

It did not come easy to them. No Spartan knows the clutter and chaos of forest warfare; their battles have been on open plain and flat field, skirmishes as rote and foretold as the moons. Days ago, fearing that inexperience, knowing it could cost them time and lives and ground, Brasidas climbed the high sailyard of his vanguard ship during their dawnlight training and shouted: _forget the phalanx, the structure of it - the single line unbroken is what will move us forward._ Hoping his voice would carry and his words would ring, and that it was not too late to teach.

Keen to prove themselves, to win blood for their family names, his people showed their brightness and learned.

Now, across the sieged forest of Pylos, they remember their ship-deck drills, exercises done with obstacles and bottlenecks to teach them adaptability. Where Athens tries to punch through, Brasidas’s men lock their shields, standing shoulder to shoulder between thick trunks and high jagged rocks like the links of a chain. Their frenzied scrum fills the air with splintered wood and rust spray and the shatter-sound of bone on metal.

The line holds.

Moved and measured by Brasidas’s calls, they advance, drawing tight and pulling loose to match the currents of Athens’s resistance. Seafire grenades clear the peltasts from the trees. More fire, more smoke, catching and clotting in the canopy like thick black tar.

“Halfway through,” Kassandra shouts, startling him. Taut of limb, eyes focused and lips pressed tight in concentration, she slips through the line on his right, and the men draw apart their shields to let her pass.

Blue-crested soldiers, painted with sweat and ash and desperate courage, fly forward to challenge her. Each of them thinking her the river god to their Achilles, the frail Aphrodite to their ferocious Diomedes, eager to lift themselves to glory on the spilling of her divine blood. Crouched and calm as a marble athlete, Kassandra meets them on the field before the steady stomping battle-line of Sparta with her _xiphos_ straight and still and her spear coiled behind her back.

One after the other, they fall. Stomachs opened and tendons slashed. Mortals, forgotten, dying in the dust.

 _The weapon of Sparta_ , Brasidas tries not to think, watching the labored roll of her bare shoulders. _Like lightning or brush-fire, that cold fear of death in battle._

She looks back at him, cocooned in smoke and orange glow. Bright blood shines across her soot-dark face, a vivid crescent from jaw to nose to brow, and he tumbles back through years, through secrets and wet eyes and hot skin -

And sees her in the half-light of summer evening on the bluffs of Methone, framed against a galaxy of white sails with the blood of his assassin across her mouth like warpaint.

She saved him that night, as would become her habit. It was the first life she took for him, the first blood he saw her spill to protect something she cared for.

If only he’d understood, then, that this was her cage. That she was forced into this: born to strength, and to a heart that could not ignore wrong, and then shown calamity after calamity that she alone could avert. Trapped there between power and duty, unable to look away; no wonder the earth seems to bend where she stands.

No wonder they both walk here with fire licking at their heels, fighting…

Shouts behind him. The rearguard and their escorted messenger, calling him through the clamor.

“The line,” Brasidas bellows, “look forward, and keep moving, _keep moving -_ ” and doubles back to meet them.

The messenger crumples between two steel-mouthed hoplites, barely conscious. Hemorrhage clots purple in the skin of his chest and shoulders. His intestines crowd through his fingers through a slashed belly. A cold snap goes down Brasidas’s spine at the sight of it; hasn’t he just come from the beach? There is no danger there - only white sand, scored by sharp keels, and a carpet of hull-crushed Athenian armor -

The news comes in gasps, half drowned by a dying rattle.

Athens’s first reinforcements from Zakynthos, not expected for another two days, have arrived. Pushed by lucky winds, and rowers worked to exhaustion, and what can only be the favor of a god. They have avoided the bay, skirted the feeble challenge of Thrasymelidas’s flotilla and come instead to Pylos where the threat is real. Four ships have landed ahead, and three behind. A strength of hundreds has fortified the land bridge to Messenia, and dozens more rush now through the forest from the beachhead to snap at Brasidas’s flank.

Numbers hail through his mind, splotches of color on his memory of Pylos’s rough geography. There’s no sending for Thrasymelidas now that Athens controls both landings. And if this is all he has, his few against their many - is it enough? Can they pivot, pull tight in the promontory’s burning center to circle their shields and guard both fronts in the same breath?

Panic rises in him; he swallows it down. _Mind your expressions._

Adapt. Startle them. He knows what they  _want_ him to do: compress and defend, so that they might surround and suffocate him under shield and surging bodies...

But what if he were to split his army? Athens is still forming ranks, folding new reinforcements into its old vanguard; if he were to section his men into two agile war parties, one driving north, the other south, to chisel through the enemy’s infant phalanxes -

“The weapon of Athens,” the messenger croaks, his voice failing, “they say he boarded a ship at Zakynthos, Deimos is here, gods - ” and dies with blood bubbling through his teeth.

Brasidas turns around to see Kassandra standing silently behind him. Fear and fury in her, and a horrible killing intent. Myrrine’s pleading comes into his ears, asking for her son, and Kassandra’s voice like a thunderclap, refusing.

“I need you to lead half this army,” he says. “One of us will stay with the land bridge force, and the other will return to the beachhead. They have more men, but our lines are stronger. If we can break their shield wall before they are ready for us, and get through to their flanks, numbers will not matter. I think that is the only chance we have.”

Kassandra nods, storm-eyed, and he knows she is deciding which of them should go.

He loves her, of course.

What a strange thing to think, now - surrounded by screams, by branches splitting and falling and exploding into cinders on charred ground. But it gnaws at him: has he told her? He tries to focus, to block out the smoke in his mouth, the sharp ring of metal in his ears. Has he told her what she is to him, what she means? Surely he should remember a thing like that, a thing so important, so essential.

And if he hasn’t -

Brasidas opens his mouth, and says nothing. No - any time but now. It would be a distraction, almost hilariously inappropriate. Worse, it might sound like something he doesn’t intend: shallow and impassioned, a product of catastrophe, or a goodbye.

New columns of blue and bronze glint through the trees ahead, mustering for another skirmish. Kassandra sheathes her sword and rips a fallen javelin from the ground beneath her. “I will take the beachhead,” she says. “Send me with twenty soldiers; keep the rest with you. Deimos will go where there are fewer men to steal his glory.”

He steps forward. She steps back.

“After,” she says. The earth bends. “Kiss me after.”

\---

They fly north, a killing harpoon thrust up through the core of Pylos. Spears leveled forward, poised on shield-rims like nocked arrows. Their flanks are naked and unguarded. As waves climb over each other onto the shore, the men shift and surge, replacing the tired with the strong and the weak with the fresh on the steel tip of their living javelin.

An irresponsible strategy, Brasidas knows. When you are outnumbered, you move slowly, for every man you lose is worth ten of theirs. You use bottlenecks, fight in tight quarters, and wait for them to come to you. You do not throw yourself headfirst into your enemy, gnashing your teeth and acting like you cannot see your own foolishness.

He suspects, through the heavy pall of exhaustion that comes with a day’s pitched and ceaseless battle, that a fair few manuals of combat will need to be rethought in the wake of this war.

There, through the trees. A wide dark band, teeming with the fractured light of moon on water - the sea! The end in sight, the moment of reversal. They will bore a hole through the last fragments of the shield wall, and spill out through it and about-face on the north cliffs of Pylos, and then it will be Athens, and not Sparta, flickering and fading in the heart of the headland like a smothered flame.

A shiver creeps up Brasidas’s neck. An eerie sense of recognition, delivered in flashes through smoke and trees and a roiling sea of bodies.

Towering over most men. Muscles like masonry. Dark hair and honey eyes and ruddy skin...

“Kassandra,” he says, breathlessly - but it’s not.

Across fire, across red mud and marsh-muck, the stranger looks him in the eye.

The pale shock of his armor is so bright that it makes Brasidas wince. Artery spray across his chest, his cheekbones. Golden beads glimmer in his hair. The forest comes apart around him, but he seems entirely apart from it: untouched by char or ash, with ember-glow behind him like a sun crown. He is achingly beautiful in the way Kassandra is, and alien in a way she has never been.

The men carry the shout down the line. Now the lunacy is theirs - dreams of legend, of mortal spears slathered in ichor. They throw themselves forward, swarming him, and Brasidas screams himself raw telling them to stop, to withdraw -   

Throat to throat Deimos leaps, like a killing wind. Not a single wasted motion in the scythe-swing of his swords. Sparta’s marines, who have survived landfall and exhaustion and days of bloody scrimmage, buckle beneath him like trampled reeds.

Brasidas feels it might drive him mad. That curve of cheek and glint of eye - the same. Taking life like pulling petals: one with horror and the other with joy. The slipstream grace of a cat or cormorant, and that heart-stopping smile warped into a childlike predatory glee…

 _Wrong_ , thinks half of him, numbly, _we made the wrong choice_ \- but the other half curls his fingers around his shield-strap, and brings it up to his bruised shoulder, and hopes.

Was it the wrong choice, if Kassandra would have leapt already? If she would have slashed her brother’s throat and left her own blood to drain into the dirt without a word?

If they were to admit, once and for all, that once evil has taken you, there is no coming back from it?

He calls back the years of bouts and playfights, wrestling in the dark. He knows her tells, knows how inconceivably fast you must be to surprise her. He knows what joint-locks will hold her, and which she can break like tearing parchment. If he can apply that knowledge - match Deimos long enough to speak, to reason - will it be enough?

Of course not, he knows, with cold certainty. Learning the wildfire does not prepare you for the flood.

A snap of silence follows the death of his last marine. Behind him, a rising swell of shouts and armor-rattle. Brasidas opens his mouth to speak, and Deimos is on him like thunder, like fire from Olympos. His arm is numb, and his legs are knocked from under him, and the pain would make him howl if he had any air in his lungs.


	20. periptyxi

“Oh,” Brasidas says.

It rings in the fog. Stretching, echoing. _Oh, oh, oh…_

Wreathed in white, surrounded by the objects of his life - inkpot, palimpsest, hordes of numbers circling and swarming like dawn-chased bats - Lagos turns around.

It’s different, looking at him, when you know the things he has done. The darkness in his face might have resembled exhaustion, or the slack of his mouth indifference; in truth, it is triumph, an earned and ferocious satisfaction. You can see every life he has taken in those pouched and deep-set eyes. Each screaming roaring soul, accepted as a casualty of progress - and alongside it, the bottomless grief that comes from the making of that choice.

This is a man who wanted something different. Who found his power, and used it, and now carries the weight of it on his neck.

Does he see the same thing in me, Brasidas wonders, in my eyes? Can he see my plans to tempt the trap of Sparta, to twist in it? To look at its joints and learn its mechanisms, and prise it open like a razor-toothed shipworm?

“Ambitious.” Lagos grins, white teeth in black beard. “But you always were, in one way or the other. To answer your question, no - I don’t see much of anything. I am, as you may have noticed - ” he chuckles deep in his throat, and it’s wet, somehow, garbled - “dead.”

Blood down Lagos’s chest. Reed-pen protruding from the hollow between his collarbones. Shame and shock rush up like bile, and Brasidas averts his eyes - as if it’s something embarrassing, something that needs privacy - but everywhere he looks, there it is, like optical debris. He tries to shade his eyes but does not, at the moment, seem to have hands. “You - Lagos, can’t you - ”

“Remove this?” Humor in Lagos’s voice. Politely, he coughs a gobbet of blood into his fist. “Go back, and perish some other way? Even if that were possible, I might choose the same. Brutal, yes, but easy and quick. Such a shock that I did not have time to notice the pain.”

“Really?”

“Probably. But never mind that - I think you want to embrace me.”

I do, Brasidas thinks. So terribly.

“Then do so,” Lagos says, and opens his arms - as they should have opened, then. “Mind the pen, though.”

 _You’re cold._ It’s something between silence and a scream, and Brasidas says it inside, which is outside, which is everywhere, for no thoughts are safe from the dead friends you conjure in sleep. _Cold as the foothills where I saved you. Cold as the ground I put you in._

“I would call that a joint effort.” Lagos’s sigh falls heavy by his ear, the chilly waterlogged breath of the dead. Around Brasidas’s back, his arms are as brittle and bloodless as squid fins. “It would be a weight off my heart if you could pass this to Phila, when you see her. An embrace from me.”

Phila, the sentinel. Steady as drumbeats. If there is any justice at all, she is on the other side of the world, calling to her captain from the cross of a topgallant while her son pries barnacles from the hull. “I don’t stand much chance of seeing her again.”

“Your chance is better than mine, wouldn’t you say?” Laughing at his own joke, Lagos draws away, and glances at something to Brasidas’s side with a wry and affected surprise. “Although - goodness. Maybe not for much longer.”

Pricking at the edges of his vision: sharp grey spikes like crow’s feet, like serrated caltrop talons. Brasidas whirls around, searching for more of it, trying to understand - why does he never notice these things until they’re pointed out? But as the pen in Lagos’s throat would not allow him to look away from it, so do the dark spines, curled like finger-bones, wink and fade when he tries to focus on them.

“You think you can get out of this,” Lagos says, pacing the edges of it, studying the thing Brasidas cannot see. “Do I have that right?”

Iron all around. A sharp-clawed cage hidden in your periphery, which you can only glimpse and guess at, but never truly know - ah. The trap of Sparta, of course: the path on which is written honor, loyalty, and self-negation, which leads quickly and cleanly to death. The road you walk because you can see no other road, because your parents and your parents' parents have ripped them all up like shattered mosaic.

This is the thing Brasidas has set his heart on tearing down.  

“It’s a genius contraption,” Lagos says, a professorial relish sparking in his eyes like fire quartz. “Teeth made to snag, like Persian broadheads. And this mechanism - taken from physician’s tools in Athens, the spring-loaded lancets they use to draw blood and cut boils. It will close on you as you pass, and that might be the end of it, if you’re smart - but put pressure on it, the slightest outward force, and - "

Lagos claps his hands before Brasidas’s face, making him wince. “The spring snaps. The jaws clamp down, hard enough to crack bones and pulverize flesh. It senses resistance, you see, and punishes it. A masterwork of evil intent; Daedalus himself - ”

“Would tremble. I know.”

Saying it leaves a bad taste on his lips. When in life was he able to _read_ Lagos? To finish his thoughts, or to know anything in his friend’s mind a moment before he was meant to? “Is this - Lagos, is this really what you would say? What you would do?”

Outside the cage, Lagos smiles. “Why shouldn’t it be?”

Because this is not _you_. It’s a forgery, a clever simulacrum. You are a model built on scraps of data, like a casebook, a spy’s truncated report: _Lagos likes well-built things, Lagos jokes when you should not, Lagos puts the most awful words in the calmest of tones - for impact, perhaps, or to see your reaction._

That is all I know of you. That is all I was able to compile before you were gone again.

Lagos sighs. Blotting up his thoughts like ink, diagnosing them. “I was more than that, of course. I am sure I contained multitudes. But you will never have another memory of me, and so this I will remain, forever.”

A thousand things pass through his face. Resolve, and guilt, and his son’s bright toothy smile. “That, I imagine, is the saddest thing about losing a person. _Some_ becomes _all,_ for it is all you will ever have.”

“I would have liked to know you like this.” The words sift and slip through Brasidas’s fingers. The shifting earth of sleep rocks under him like a galley deck, as if the ground is moments from crumbling away under his feet. “I wish we could have been friends again.”

“Why,” Lagos says, with a rich warm hurt in his eyes, “I did not know we stopped being friends.”     

\---                                                       

And the sun sets.

The room, if it was a room at all, empties. The sky shifts like eventide: once a clear white light across the weary lines of Lagos’s face, now the purple of orchids, of bruises, now a deep shade of night as dark as the sea.

Now the smoke and soot of burning things clotting the air.

A pang of irritation strikes him. This is his dream, isn’t it? Shouldn’t he have some say in its contents?

Red mud and marsh-muck unroll before him like parchment. Fire eats at his ankles, burns at his lungs. Across it, she blinks at him out of the haze, her face masked in smoke and the glint of sun on iron, and the tightness goes out of him in a single rushing breath, _gods, Kassandra, the dreams I’ve had -_

Gold beads in her hair. A killing light in her eyes. She moves like a reflection disturbed, raising her hand slowly, as if lifted by armature, and points at him: _you, you._

He should run. What else can you do, when a god tells you they are coming to kill you? But running is not in his blood, so he reaches for her instead.

She bends away from him - farther, always, than he can touch. He fights to make her out through a murky infinity: not like water, but like sludge, the sort made from dirt and corpses and sloughing seawater that grabs you by your feet and sucks you down, down...

“Deimos,” he says, “please. If you knew what you’d lost, what you could have again - please - ”

Click, hiss. The spring snaps. Iron jaws close on him, and Deimos lunges, and hard white daylight burns through his eyes like seafire.

\---

Sound and color. Birds, voices, footfall on gravel. The purr of wind through wheat, through olive leaves. Pottery shatter and a distant curse.

Brasidas does not stop reaching for Kassandra, though it seems more obvious every moment that she is not there, and that his hands have not moved from his sides in some time.

The face before him swims, settles. Streaks of grey through dark heat-frayed hair, and new lines around the mouth and eyes. In square slats of morning light through the windows, Kassandra becomes Deimos becomes a boundless dizzying wall of flashing mountain-cat eyes, which then becomes Myrrine.

What the fuck is happening? Brasidas opens his mouth; nothing comes out. His lips and throat are impossibly dry, cracked as salt flats. Myrrine inclines her head towards a lambskin canteen on the bedside table, and he tumbles for it with no grace at all.

“What happened?” he rasps, when the skin is empty. His throat burns like he’s swallowed scorpion venom, but at least he can get _something_ out, even if he can’t quite decide what: “Where - is this Sparta? Kassandra, Deimos - the headland, the forest - how did I - ”

Nausea now, of all things. Brasidas closes his eyes, draws a slow rattling breath, and commands himself not to vomit on Myrrine's lap.

“We lost,” she says, a low hollow voice in the dark. “Pylos fell after you were wounded. The north shore was taken back, and the navy burned on the sea. The men the navarch put on Sphakteria held fast for a time, but I imagine they are in Athens by now, in chains.”

His eyes blink open - _in chains?_ \- and Myrrine nods absentmindedly.

It takes a moment to understand, and another to believe. Spartans, captured. Not dead but taken. Clutching at their lives, which have no value in defeat.  

The room is still changing, filling with detail in wet rough splotches. Wall, window, the red of Myrrine's dress, coming to him slowly, as if his eyes are awakening color by color, concept by concept. Experimentally, he waits for Kassandra to appear too: in a corner, or outside the doorframe, bleeding back into him like the other bits of his slumbering life.

Myrrine watches him with a distant sadness. A summer wind stirs the beeches outside, a soft vast sighing of the land, and Brasidas speaks in a rush to drive away the stinging sense of aloneness. “I remember - I went to the north, she to the south. I remember breaking the shield wall. Clearing a landing for the navy. Then - ”

He’s almost too embarrassed to go on. What would you call the thing that happened next? Hope, stupidity? A wide-eyed dream of bringing the woman he loved something better than the head of her brother, and then the punishment: a pain so immediate that it blotted out his whole world like an eclipse.

Unfocused, Myrrine's eyes list down towards the bindings on his shield arm, soaked through with dry brown blood, where a dull ache has begin to throb. A defensive wound, one you would not receive approaching with raised spear. “You tried to bring him back.”

 _Did I?_ A raw laugh bursts up through him. “I barely raised my shield. I had no time to try anything.”

“You intended to.”

Brasidas stares at the floor. Unable, truly, to see how that matters. “Do you know where she is?”

Slowly, Myrrine shakes her head, and Brasidas knows from the tight line of her lips and the jump of tendons in her jaw that she would give anything in the world for a different answer.

“I’m glad you’re awake,” she says, softly, and rises from the bedside to smooth her dress over her hips. “I am going to Athens, where they would have taken her. I may still have contacts there who can help me search.”

Naturally, Brasidas attempts to stand after her. Quick as a vole-hunting fox, she clamps a hand down on his wounded shoulder, trapping him back against the bed with a surge of arcing white-hot pain and speaking over his ragged shout. “No. If you want to be of any use, then stay.”

“I can help,” he protests - weakly, for the nausea has begun to return - “I’ll join you when I’ve healed. We’ll find her, and Deimos. We’ll look together.”

With a begrudging affection, as Kassandra might discuss her favorite criminal on Kephallonia, Myrrine clicks her tongue. “Think on this, Brasidas. Use the brain my daughter so admires. You were a nameless officer on foreign soil once; you are something more now. A leader and spymaster - a hero, to some. The tools you have here are far greater than those you would have if you followed me to Athens.”

Brasidas winces. His wound burns under Myrrine’s grip, a deep and unrelenting reminder. “Those tools may not be as sharp as you think. If Pylos ended as you say, then I am just another Spartan general who cannot win a battle.”

“Until you show me a Spartan general who can,” Myrrine says, releasing his shoulder pointedly, as if to say _I am trusting you_ , “then I think you are the best they have.”

The beeches breathe. Birds blacken the room with their noisy flocking shadows. Gathering her spear from the bedside, Myrrine moves silently to the door, and lingers for a moment with her hand on the frame - looking back as if committing the room, and him, to memory.

Not gods, Brasidas thinks numbly, absently. They are not, were never gods. Just people, with love and foolish hearts and the quiet wounded dignity of those who have never stopped searching for what they have lost.

“Make us proud,” Myrrine says, smiling, and vanishes.


	21. miasma

Hellas knows when you have done something wrong. When you have stolen, or murdered, or violated some unspoken social order, the gods hear it as a sour note or snapped string, and weave a shroud of guilt to stalk you until the debt is repaid.

It hangs in your periphery like a swarm of paper wasps. It infects the things around you - your neighbors, your family. It poisons water and kills children in the womb. Every pump of your heart spreads it farther, etches it deeper. It is called _miasma,_ and it veils every part of the world you touch in a curse-fog as charged and heavy as thunderhead.

Brasidas has not murdered anyone, to his knowledge (so long as the definition of that does not include lives taken in war or defense - a topic too large for his searing headache). But a thick pall hangs over the streets of Sparta, and he feels beyond all doubt that he must have been the one to breathe it into the world.

The cloth of commerce has come loose like a kicked rug. The unwavering mechanism that has worked under him all his life, that steady river of soldiers, slaves, fishers, farmers, mongers, musicians, potters, carpenters - diverted. They move erratically, in jerking starts and aimless circles, and wear the loss of Pylos like a roughspun mourning cloak.

The worst part, Brasidas thinks, must be the melancholy. For all the things his people lack, they have always been joyful - all jeers and sparkling laughter and killer-whale smiles - and the absence of that joy stings more than any god-given wound.

He stumbles through it, bleeding through his bandages, and searches for the story of his failure.

It comes in fragments from Sparta’s elites, who have heard it in fragments from bards, and so on through an endless chain of runners, messengers, and dispatch riders. The best accounts, the most honest, come from the helots that watched the sea-battle from the crowded cliffs of Messenia, chewing their knuckles and yearning, through a cryptolect of shared glances and battered white-hot fury, for the change an Athenian victory might bring.

Four hundred Spartiates stood in rising wine-light on the banks of Sphakteria, beating their shields and preparing to pounce. They would be invaluable, Thrasymelidas promised - a vital ingredient of victory. They would cut off the enemy’s escape route, the shores to which they might try to flee when they tasted defeat. With sharp spears and hostile land on all sides, unable to retreat to shore or sea, Athens would crumble.

The bay choked on cypress and sailcloth and canisters of unburnt seafire. The navarch Thrasymelidas died at dawn, in the narrow inlet where he thought to prove Sparta's mastery of her home waters.

The roar that swelled above the sea had two faces. Grimacing despair from the hoplites trapped ashore, and from the helots on the cliffs, a fierce and long-awaited rapture. A few fled in the night: the lucky and able-bodied, without families or friends to anchor them. Like driven herds they flooded into the Athenian garrison on the headland, where they would be sheltered and succored with no expectation of payment (a fair price, Athens must have concluded, for the blow it would strike to their former masters). Those that remained bought their lives diving through blockades to deliver honey and linseed to Sparta’s starving sons.

It was not enough. The battle was no longer against an army, but against madness and starvation. In the end, the surviving soldiers weighed glory and surrender, and found glory lacking.

So it was that the myth of Sparta - the blood of lions, who would die on their feet or not at all - lost its luster.

 _About fucking time_ , Brasidas thinks, and turns his attention to the mystery of his own survival.

Theories abound. It was a rogue navy ship that saved him, arriving in a blaze of seafire not a moment too late to drag him back to the mainland. No, the navy never left the bay; it was a band of brave helots that stole across the land-bridge to rescue the survivors of Pylos. No, it was the Spartan reserves, led by a goddess, who returned from victory at the south shore and together drove off the dread Deimos. No, this is it, certainly: Kassandra came alone, her men slaughtered in battle, and swept her mortal lover to safety before rising to the stars in crashing blade-cross with her god-brother, two constellations locked in brilliant eternal combat.

Bullshit, Brasidas snaps at the gossipers. Kassandra did not rise to the fucking stars. What did they see, really? Think, now - was she captured at Pylos? Did she return to Sparta before vanishing? Did she save him from her brother’s sword only to leave for some other reason?

Every Spartan, citizen or helot, puts their hands up in deference and gives the same reply: _the gods answer to no one_. Between them an uncrossable barrier, a thick-mortared wall of fear and faith. To these people she is a mural, a fresco frozen in high-chinned divinity: a golden statue to be draped in wreaths and painted with goat’s blood but never understood.

How can such a thing be missing, they ask, when she was never truly here to begin with?

Brasidas is not blameless in this. He knows it with a sinking shame - remembers the ember of awe in his chest, the words he felt when he looked at her. Titan, demigod: things she detested. And now he stands embogged in that lie, trapped in a story he did nothing to change.

Across the promenade, a crier catches his ear with the latest news from abroad.

A Spartan shield, ripped from one of her most fearsome generals on the bloody field of Pylos, has been displayed as a trophy in the acropolis of Athens. Buffed, shined, inscribed with a victor’s gloat: a brazen monument to show the weary and embittered that the blood of warriors is not unspillable.

Chin up, Spartan.

Yes - she would say this sometimes. With a shared secret in her smile, a mocking echo of their first meeting.

Such a sad and petty brag.

You know why they boast, don’t you?

Because they’re afraid.

Why should they be?

Why fear something like me? A man who led a hundred bright strong marines to a pointless death, who sees so clearly what is wrong but lacks the power to change it?

Power is foresight.

Power is bending will with words.

Power is what they needed to send

my brother

to defeat.

The world sways - or perhaps he does. Unwilling to collapse on Sparta's main thoroughfare, Brasidas braces himself on a bench and sinks down to rest his wounds.

Do not think of her. Do not. Think of your next move, of your tattered reputation. Think of all the training you will need to reverse these weeks of atrophy. Think of your long hair and unkempt beard, and your house and station, which must be put in order.

 _After,_ she said. He remembers that now. _Kiss me after._

Why would she ask such a thing? Why would he listen? Why would they think themselves above _safety_ , the thing that ruled them for so long? What arrogance, what unbelievable fucking hubris - to think there could never be a final word, or kiss, or touch of fingers on spine.

So many things he allowed to slip by, not thinking any of them might be the last.

“General.”

Brasidas looks up with a start, wrenching his shoulder and cringing with nausea.

The man standing before him - short, wiry, with dark-circled eyes and sun fraying gold through ringlets of dark curling hair - extends his hand.

Brasidas stares at it, uncomprehending. Is this a joke? When you are born to a life of agony, when you spend your heart and blood lifting yourself out of it, and before you sits the man who took that labor and made it meaningless -

You do not help him to his feet. You hate him and the foul _miasma_ he has placed on your city. You leap at him with your fists and your teeth for tarnishing the dream you've chased, especially when you are Lysander, when you have so much fire in you that it spills out from your eyes and mouth like a spitting hearth.   

Bafflingly, Lysander grins. “Don't look so glum, General. Defeat is a thing you can reject.”

Brasidas blinks at him. The hand fanned before his nose waves insistently, opens wider, as if brushing away wisps of curse-fog. “Three weeks of the deep-sleep is not irreversible. Men of mine have come back from worse. I hear the ephors are suing for peace, so there will be no new campaigns this season - but they have given me leave to help you recover.” Pride, and a low rumbling laugh, swell his chest. “Gods only know. With you in this state, maybe I will finally stand a chance at a pin.”

And Brasidas understands.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are Lysander. That you have searched all your life for a state that sees your value, a cause that deserves your fervor; say you finally trade your cage of class for a cage of laurels, only find those laurels brown and wilted. Say you are Lagos, who saw the broken edges of the world, or Myrrine, who had her hope crushed like bulrushes under her feet, or Kassandra - alone, somewhere, knowing for the first time the dirt-iron taste of loss.

Say you are Brasidas - who, for the first time in many years and many campaigns, has found himself tired, sore, and heartsick.

What do you do?

\---

Consider the machine of Athens.

To call it a city would be reductive. It’s a system - no, an _organism_ , a complex living thing: an engine of flesh and stone. Its unerring mechanism has carried it through siege, through crowding and disease, things that would have killed another nation.

A simple equation drives it, a matter of inputs and outputs. Through its mouth it sucks in raw goods, vast quantities of wood and iron and silver, and sends those things through its lungs and liver and guts to become ships and weapons and money - the sum of which is war.

How can you choke such a thing into silence? Its innards are protected, so you cannot strike at the conversion point. Its breath is barbed. What can you take away in order to jam a metal splinter between its gearteeth and stop its maniacal production?

“The air,” Lysander ventures - which is correct - and levers Brasidas neatly to the ground with a foot around his ankle and a forearm to his throat. “You’re not paying attention,” he complains.

Flat on his back and breathless from impact, Brasidas laughs, and the burn makes him feel alive. “Oh, I am. I am.”

That night, bruised and sore and exhilarated, he lowers himself on aching knees to pull the fat sheaf of maps from below his bed.

Her thoughts, written hard and eager: _Aigyptos_ , _gold-limned, land of builders; Anatolia, meeting place for migrants; Thrake,_ _song and rhetoric, home of Orpheus and Protagoras and King Diomedes._ But closer than that, in the north of Hellas, are the tributaries of Athens - a cluster of towns along the headlands of Chalkidike, peppered with pinholes where the agents of chaos once ruled.

Where I severed the heads of Kosmos,

thinking that would be enough.

Rich fields here. Lands that yield dates and grain at the barest touch of a plow, deep caves swollen with ore, and thick forests of oak and cypress from shore to shore.

Even without their masters, these arteries pump silver and timber, set in perpetual motion like a beheaded mantis. Like Lagos, these cryptarchs did not expect to outlive their designs. The structures they built, those thorny webs of work and trade…

They will endure.

While they stand -

the mines, the mills, the mints -

Athens will fight.

Brasidas was honed for war and whetted for obedience, made to be a living weapon of Sparta. But he has been a weapon for too long. It is the arm that chooses when to strike, when to stay, and where to aim the blade.

“You cannot call an emergency war council,” Archidamos tells him, wearily, when the ephors have assembled, “when there is no war.”

No sense answering that. The war has not ended; it has adjourned. It will begin again the moment Sparta licks her wounds and decides that the shamed survivors of Sphakteria are not worth her loyalty. “I intend to mount a campaign north,” Brasidas announces. “A thousand soldiers should do. I expect such a force will take time to raise, but I would prefer to embark as soon as possible.”

Archidamos makes a small strangled noise in his throat, a hybrid of groan and cough. “Your ignorance is forgiven, given your recent infirmity. We may not occupy Attika; the terms of our armistice prohibit it.”

“I am aware.”

“Then you would have me breach that peace? Have you no care for the Spartiates in Athens, the men who - ” A thrill of panic through the council; no, we mustn’t say it! Uneasily, Archidamos finishes, “who were taken?”

“I care for all Spartans:,” Brasidas says. “I care that the war ends, permanently. And I promise you that what I intend will not violate the terms of your truce.”

The usual silence follows his words. Almost imperceptibly, Archidamos sinks into his throne. “What,” he asks, reluctantly, “do you intend?”

“Akanthos, Skione, Torone. What do you know of these cities?”

An ephor bends down to whisper into the old king’s ear. He listens, nods impatiently, waves the man away. “Colonies, cleruchies. Athenian holdings in Makedonia. Farming towns, of little import to us.”

 _Little import_. A dismissal, gut-sure as breathing, leveled at anything that does not promise open combat and shield-scrum.

“Those farming towns,” Brasidas says, with a river’s patience, “feed and arm our enemies. Imagine Athens without ships, without weapons or rations or tar for their hulls - that is what she would be if the colonies of Chalkidike did not pay her tribute.” He glances to the side, listening for the murmur of men trying to ignore the sense in it, and continues: “They live under Athenian rule, but it galls them. They can be made to renounce it if better terms are offered. That is what I will do, if you allow me this expedition.”

With troubled reckoning in his thin blue eyes, Archidamos vanishes again into the circle of his advisors.

Variables in this too, as on any battlefield. First, the terrible inconvenient fact that Brasidas is right - that the place to strike is not in the heartland of their enemy but at its flank. Then the matters that complicate the decision: the length of the campaign, the distance, the nebulous terms of the armistice, the broken trails of rumor that might deliver news of his activities to prying ears, and the prisoners of Sphakteria, whose spear arms, at least, will be missed…

“We will offer this honor," says Archidamos at last, "to the helots of Messenia."

He waits, as Brasidas did, for the shock of it to settle before going on.

“We can spare five hundred - a generous number, I think you will agree. The ephors will select them for you. They are untrained and of poor stock, yes, but strong and obedient: the best qualities in a soldier.”

Archidamos waves distantly, looking through him, and Brasidas feels the room receding from him like a ripcurrent. “I trust that a general of your caliber will rise to the challenge.”

\---

Brasidas wants to shout crazed laughter, to grab the nearest person by the arms and shake them:  _do you see the absurdity here?_

Behold Brasidas of Sparta and his army of slaves, his legion in chains! See how a man born to everything commands men born to nothing, who have been culled like livestock, hunted like an infestation, and now thrown at a faraway problem as one might throw peat on marsh-fire.

Sprawled across red clay roof tiles, rosy and ridiculous with wine, Lysander wrinkles his nose. “You think too much.”

“Someone ought to.” Brasidas stares moodily into his cup. “Perhaps if our leaders thought more and acted less, we would not be trapped in a war that will never end. Perhaps we would have taken Athens years ago, and fewer Spartans would be wounded or captured or dead.”

“Like old Thrasymelidas,” Lysander crows, with a wholly inappropriate glee, “who thought he could out-sail Athens! Dead at the bottom of the ocean, and still talked about like he owes us something.” He puffs his chest in pantomime: “Such a shame, his wife bore no children, and his father is too old for heirs, a waste of strong stock - who fucking cares?”

Brasidas is drunk enough to laugh at this, wide and loud, and it bounces down through the brick and stucco of the alleys below like a tossed stone.

Perhaps sensing a kind of invitation, Lysander swirls his cup in loose-wristed circles and casts a glance over the side of the roof, where two men have begun the drunken overtures of a street brawl. “Why not just take the old king’s offer? These are men of no inborn value, bred for servitude, who must obey - that is what any commander wants, isn’t it?”

And in his words Brasidas feels the hair-raising shadow of a test.

“I cannot take them,” he says slowly, measuring and re-measuring his response, “because they have not asked for this. They have not asked to serve me, or leave their families, or give their lives in battle.”

“You think this will make them poor soldiers?"

“No. Only that of all those Sparta has imprisoned, her hooks are deepest in them. I would not add another lock to that prison.”

“Would the honor not elevate them?” Lysander’s eyes snap to him, knife-sharp in dusklight. “Serving the state brings meaning to our lives. It validates the happenstance of our birth, allows us to prove that we are worthy of our blood. Dying for Sparta is the greatest privilege a mortal life can bestow.”

“I do not,” Brasidas says, “think it is.”

Silence, but for the sound of thudding fists and half-dazed yelping from the brawlers below. Lysander slings his cup out beside him, and wine arcs out of it in jagged furrows, red streaks torn through the air like claw-marks. “Do you know why Archidamos offered you five hundred helots?”

Brasidas focuses on the distant colonnades of Sparta’s thoroughfare. The beginnings of a headache prod at the back of his neck. “Because he does not see the value in this campaign. Because the few Spartiates that remain are needed for defense. Because the journey is too long and dangerous for citizens - ”

And then, dawning on him like a searing winter sunrise: “Because he expects this campaign to kill us.”

“Expects it. Wants it.” Lysander smiles his compound smile, layered with pride and rage and a lifetime of deep unknowable wounds. “Tell me if you have heard this story. Years ago, the state gathered the strongest of our people - _my_ people, General, not yours - and told them they would be emancipated. They were dressed with garlands and honored like athletes. They danced in joy around the temple of Athena, thinking themselves freed, reborn - ” (and Brasidas _remembers_ this, remembers watching the procession in bemusement with the other boys, who did not understand, and Lagos, who undoubtedly did - )

Lysander’s teeth flash in the dark. “The _krypteia_ took them into the foothills of Taygetos and cut their throats. Two thousand of them - men and women both - in the peak of their joy. I have gone there, and seen the upturned dirt.”

“Two thousand,” Brasidas echoes, his throat dry.

“You think that is too many to kill? Sparta thought it was too many to live. Too many when strength is our value, the reason we are permitted to exist - strength to carry children, to till fields, to pass javelins to our masters on the battlefield. They’re right to fear us, of course. As long as they have stood on our backs, we have waited for their misfortune. Watching for war, for disaster, building our signals and cants. Knowing that if one of us caught one of them alone and without witness, we would eat them raw.”

A twinge in Brasidas’s stomach. A shock of sobriety shivers through him, like ice water poured down his back. He is abruptly, painfully aware of his own dulled senses, and the lost strength Lysander has spent the month attempting to train back into him, and the dizzying height from roof to pavement. “Are you not speaking to one of them, now?”

“If I am,” Lysander says, leaning back on his hands, “then I expect he will let me know.”

No movement below them. The street-fight has ended in sleepy silence, both men flat on the ground in varying states of bloodied wreckage.  

“What now?” Brasidas asks, thickly, in that tone he hates to hear in his own voice, a tone of helpless frustration. “I know how to end the war. I know how to break the cage, this thing that keeps our people - yours _and_ mine - marching always towards death. But how can I, if it means taking Archidamos’s offer?”

Lysander leans forward. Light catches in the curling fray of his hair and the shark’s aspect of his smile. Brasidas flinches away - too late, of course, if harm was intended.

“Here,” Lysander says, refilling Brasidas’s cup from the clay pot between them, “is what you can do.”

\---

“I have thought on your proposal, my king, and truthfully, I find it puzzling.

“I am forced to ask - do you understand the predicament you are in? Not just your armistice, or your lost Spartiates, or the disaster at Sphakteria; those are tangential. Do you understand the size of the problem, and how ill-equipped you are to fix it?

“You have been at war for seven years. Your people are tired, and your soldiers are dying. You are outmatched - a deer fighting a shark, an old thalassocracy with rich harbors and faraway colonies and access to shores we will never know. You have an army of men you have trained to seek their own deaths, and a small naked city built on the backs of those who hate you with their every breath, and enemies in light and shadow both who would see that city fall.

“You are standing at the edge of destruction, my king. The lightest touch will send you over it.

“But that is beside the point. I have decided to accept your offer. I will take your helots - the men you hoped would die quietly in the north so you would not have to kill them yourself. It is, as you say, a generous offer.

"Only…”

Power is

bending will with words.

“You will not choose them. You will not pluck them from their families, from their homes, if they wish to stay. I will go into the valley with advisors of my choosing, and your _krypteia_ will not follow.

“I will tell the helots of Messenia, plainly, what I hope to achieve. I will ask nothing more than they are willing to give. As many step forward, so many will you clothe and outfit and ration. None will be denied.”

Power is your blood, and the seat it gives you.

Power is your voice, and that they will listen to it.

Power is the skill you have shown, the things they cannot deny.

“When their service is done, you will grant them freedom from rank and country both. You will not bind them to this place, as Spartiates and their families and their slaves are bound; you will allow them to take their loved ones and go where they wish.”

Brasidas opens his hands towards the room, palms up in invitation - _a reasonable request, don’t you think?_ “Make me these promises, and I will win your war for you.”

I do so love to

watch you solve puzzles.

Archidamos, grey and small and afraid in his weathered throne, considers him in silence.

Old man, Brasidas thinks, you have been so many things to me. Mentor, sponsor, father, enemy. You have smiled at me and warmed me to my core, and you have disappointed me more than anyone else. You have been my reason, my drive, and my obstacle.

And now you will be a tool

for peace.

“Fine,” Archidamos says, rising from his throne, drawing himself up in the spiral of his wine-red robes, “fine, damn you and damn this war, this fucking war - ”

In the pillared light of dawn, a crushed-cherry delta of cloud and sky and splintered sun, seven hundred helots march to the north.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you made it all the way through this long long chapter, you're a trooper and I appreciate you <3
> 
> very sorry to seth dickinson for barefacedly stealing your right-justified-dead-lover-in-your-head literary mechanic. I read the monster baru cormorant last month and have not gone a day without thinking about it.


	22. tzogos

The army hews a stumbling path up through the peninsula: a clumsy clot of non-soldiers, broad with the bulk of sun-singed fieldwork and fearsome as any mountain cat and completely, utterly uncoordinated.

Strength is not the issue. Any of them, trained to box or wrestle, might easily subdue his citizen counterpart. But strength, Brasidas now realizes, is only a fraction of the joy that comes from commanding an army of Spartiates - that rhythmic pace as natural as snapping to a drumbeat. The rest of it comes from the ordeals of childhood, the fear of shame and ostracism, and a life’s devotion to fitting oneself into the narrowest, most orderly role.

But this is Brasidas’s commission, isn't it? To buff out the deep scratches Sparta has made in her people, and to shatter the notion that discipline can come only from suffering. Training a new army should be the first and simplest step on that road. After all, aren’t the lines of battle as clear to him as rivers parting around rocks, as stupid-simple as lines of ants moving from one hill to the next?

If each man is his own puzzle, a discrete unit with power and passions and a breaking point, isn’t the secret simply to learn those parameters and work within them?

But his soldiers - the men in their borrowed broast plates and wool-wrapped women who drive the pack animals and keep watch in the night - have no trust for him. Why should they? They expected another master, an iron-lipped warlord, and received instead this bizarre and ghoulish amalgamate: a Spartiate without a cloak, who drinks too much unmixed wine, who calls out in the night for a fairytail hero, and who does not seem to realize he is a wounded lion among wolves, and that those wolves have been unmuzzled.

How deeply they must remember the thing Lysander shared with him. The promise of freedom, and garlands, and a long walk. Cold steel across the throat and a deep grave in the hills. Do they see _krypteia_ in the shade now, mad with thirst, lurking naked with their long knives and waiting for Brasidas's signal?

That fear could be a shield, he knows: the thing standing between him and a gasping death in the night. But the thought makes his stomach curl. _There are no secret police here_ , he insists at the bonfire each night - _Sparta has no eyes in this army. I am true to my word, and my intentions are good, I swear -_

Lysander watches, grinning, and does not offer to vouch for him.

They chase autumn’s cooling hand north, pointed towards their lodestar: the three headlands of Chalkidike that jut like a jagged trident into the waters of the Aegean. They pass through Arkadia, across the saddles of the Parnonas and the thin neck of Korinthia, where the greenwood grows bare enough that the fear of discovery keeps Brasidas awake for days.

“Scour the hills,” he orders his captains in a rush of manic energy, “send your quickest across the highlands, a half-day’s travel in each direction.” Two days’ unbroken walking has left the army straddling the edge of Boeotia, half inside and half out - so close to safety, to diplomatically neutral ground, and absurdly unprepared for battle. “Athens cannot know we are here. If they see us breaching their borders, taking an army inside Attika - ”

But there are no Athenians in the mountains. No one is watching Sparta’s helot army, the feeble afterthought of a sinking city, trembling north like a dead leaf shaken loose from the tree.

The discovery sends Lysander into a ferocious sulk, and allows Brasidas to breathe for what feels like the first time in months. Inattention, anonymity: these things fit him like boxing wraps. He has never done his best work while being watched.

They cross onto the mainland, trudging weary progress through storm-slick marshes. Thick boughs shade them from the sun. Brasidas splits his army into columns and those columns into lines, and trains them in the hidden light of dusk, in the secret hours before they begin their nightly march.

“Eight months,” Lysander guesses, watching their drills from the commander’s tent as a chilly squall soaks the earth. “Eight months before they could stand against Athens and win.”

Brasidas lays down his stylus and wrings the tension from his hand. Too much writing, too soon after a spar. The ghost of his injury dogs him, a vein of numbness down through his fingertips that never seems to let him forget. “If I have my way, they will not need to fight. Not soon, at least. Just to move quickly and cast a shadow of strength.”

“And that will be enough?” Amusement wreaths Lysander's voice like smoke rings. “You’ll turn Athens’s tributaries with words - is that it?”

“With better terms. With reason.” Brasidas lays his hand on the palimpsest before him, on all his hopes for a bloodless resolution. “They already want relief from tribute. They want freedom from a faraway tyrant that leeches their resources and meddles in their affairs. If I offer them those things, they will declare for Sparta.”

Lysander watches him, tongue between his teeth, as if tasting the air for doubt or hesitation. When Brasidas shows none, he shrugs, nods, and helps himself to a cup of wine from the war table. “And if Athens decides they’d rather not have us skulking around in their highlands after all?”

“We'll stay hidden. They won’t know we’re here or where we’re headed. We’ll need to misdirect them, to know the north better than they do, which means - ”

Spies, of course. Spies and scouts and runners, informants to build reports on distant cities and surveyors to reveal the playing field ahead. People who pass unnoticed, who can travel light and learn quickly and sharpen his blurry maps of the lands beyond the Peloponnese.

Brasidas goes down into camp, and in the daughters of Messenia finds the eyes and ears that will win the north.

They cluster around him, rangy, farm-strong, hungry for challenge. “We must learn the coasts of Chalkidike,” he tells the first, a tall girl in laborer’s clothes with eyes like sharp grey winter, “the cities must be mapped, high ground and natural defenses marked. We must know where their gates are and how they might be breached. And - ” turning now to an older woman muscled like a hunter, with rough knotted boar-tusk scars on her hands - “we need a safe route north. Forested, a day’s pace from the coast, where the forage and hunting are rich enough to sustain us when the rations run out. The moment we loot or requisition from the cities in the north, we become invaders. Common bandits come to pillage, to be driven off like wild dogs.”

They draw back to speak among themselves, intent and low-voiced. Excluding him. Deciding, maybe, whether the task he has set is worth their labor.

“Give us the maps you have,” says the hunter, beckoning. “We will cut through the fog.”

“Thank you,” Brasidas says in rushing relief, “thank you - ” and then, to all of them, to their keen eyes in morning mist: “What are your names? Only so that I can record them, and recognize your missives - ”

Silence streaks through them. Brasidas feels chagrin prickling down his neck - is a name too personal a thing for a commander to ask? - and then the hunter says, with humor glimmering in her eyes: “Alekto.”

Brasidas frowns. Alekto the unceasing anger, fury-child of Ouranos. He did not know this was a name taken by mortals, much less the helots of Messenia - and then the next calls herself Nyx, and the next ones Tisiphone and Eris and Achlys and Megaera, and it clicks into place like the setting of a bone.

Goddesses of discord, of darkness and dark things: vengeance and destruction and other icons of the wronged. Clean names, to replace old ones given in bondage and weighed down by memory.

When the bulk of them have left, taking his maps and parchments and riding into the hills in lean detachments, Brasidas asks of a young woman who calls herself Nemesis a selfish thing, the thing closest to his heart.

“I understand,” she says with a studious nod, as mildly as if he has asked her to muck out a stable. “You want me to find the patron of Sparta. The long-leaper, the shieldbare. Divine Kassandra, the hunter god who hates her godhead.”

Brasidas tries to answer this with poise. But the image of Kassandra’s glower, her rolled eyes and the sidelong glare that seems to say _this again, always this_ , is so potent behind his eyelids that he begins to laugh, loud and weak and hurt.

“No,” he breathes, under Nemesis’s curious stare, “no, if you go to Athens seeking a god, you will not find one. The way you see her, speak of her - that is a story Sparta has told. From the start they looked away from her, as you would squint against the sun. Like she was a flaw in the air.”

Like I would

shatter them.

“They took every pain to distance her,” Brasidas says, his throat tight. “To cut her out of the world. I think they did not know what to do with a woman like Kassandra, and so they tried to take away her realness.”

Nemesis considers him in silence. Stillness goes all through her, from toe to moss-mottled eyes, like the cold that comes before rain.

“Divinity does not seem such a curse to me,” she says, finally, with an air of admission. “What is real can die. And she was not seen again after Pylos - was she?”

Words form and die in his mouth. The forest breathes, unmoved. Down through the leaves come the chitters of diving eagles and sharp-eyed kestrels, lofty dancers locked in tight predatory circles. Perhaps sensing that her question has stolen the last of Brasidas’s strength, Nemesis gathers her skirts and binds them at the knee and slips away into the trees.

\---

The plains of Thessalia, divine battleground and grave of the titans, sprawl before them like the golden fields of the dead.

The army falters on its border. Cowed and unbalanced by the vast flat beauty of it, by its wheat and straw and olive groves and distant swatches of sun and storm that fall over the earth in erratic quilted patterns. You can see to the edge of the earth, they gasp - pointing, shouting it down the line, pulling each other forward through the ranks and absolutely wrecking the phalanx - it must end there, just beyond those mountains! There must be only void beyond, the empty darkness that came before Nyx laid her world-making egg -

Dragged to the front of the formation with gleeful shouts ringing in his ears - _look, look! -_ Brasidas laughs and ends their march early, so that they can camp on the lip of the valley and watch the sun paint the world in fire and honey.

Down in the valley, the army shivers, chilled by mist and summit-wind off the steeps of Olympos in the north. The gods cast cold shadows, it is said - but with the cooling of the air comes the warming of the fire and the people around it.

Their footsteps grow stronger, surer. Trust becomes synchronism. The men begin to smile and laugh and drink by the fireside, and the women grow rowdier, wrestling by dawnlight and awarding each other leaves and stones - a gleeful mockery of Sparta’s gaudy wartime rituals. Song and poetry drift through the camp, stronger each night, and Brasidas finds himself goaded into camp to hear their stories and tell his own.

They talk of revolution. Of changing the face of war, of hurtling through the imprisoned north like a comet that cuts chains and shatters cages. They talk of giving the army a name, an epithet, for that is the last step before rising into legend.

(“We’ll call ourselves the Brasidians!” Lysander caws, thrilled beyond words to see Brasidas cover his eyes in mortification. “From one master to another, only this one lies better, and does not beat them - I should compose an epic, don’t you think?")

In the last days of autumn, the spies begin to return.

First: Tisiphone, the mapper, with armfuls of parchment covered in drawings as sharp and measured as marble frieze. And she has not just marked the cities, Brasidas realizes in wonder as she rolls them out before him, but the shorelines, the thickets, the cliffs and embankments where peltasts might repel an invading force, and - most impressively - every resource the north commands, drawn out in bright coordinated inks that might make Lagos whistle. The hunter Alekto comes a week later, her eyes lined with exhaustion, her numbers thinned. New scars cross her shoulders. “We came upon trouble in the mountains,” she says, looking away with a quiet regal shame, “but the route we found is good,” and stains it cornel-red on Tisiphone’s maps.

Last to return is flax-haired Nemesis, whose task was deadliest, for it took her into the very heart of Athens.

“I found a woman there,” she says, irritably - and then quickly, when Brasidas’s eyes widen, “she was not your real Kassandra. But…”

Onto the pile of unread leaters on his war table she lays a neatly folded square of parchment, sealed modestly with a drop of red wax and emblazoned on its corner with a compact letter _mu_. “She cornered me in an alley, and criticized my spy-work, and interrogated me for hours before she would give me this.”

Brasidas leaps for it. His heart thunders, his chest yawningly, dizzyingly empty. _Mu_ for _Myrrine_ : a quiet calligraphy, neat square lines so unlike her daughter’s. He rips open the seal quickly enough to tear the parchment halfway down the middle, and nearly shouts with laughter at the single word written there in the center of the page:

_Nothing._

“I’m sorry,” Nemesis says, peering over the top of the paper, and offers him the next letter off his pile. “Perhaps Sparta has better news.”

It does not. Brasidas scans down the page in a haze of disappointment, that old dogged numbness prickling at his fingertips, pique pressing on his eyes like a wine headache. Here are the ephors’ requirements for tribute from newly captured cities, a clipped report on the status of the truce, a lamentation for the elites still held in Athens, and an ill-tempered warning not to stray from his mission.

Remember the terms that were set. Remember the families of your soldiers, and what might befall them if you think to defy your command, to abscond with Sparta’s rightful property…

And then, at the end of it, a begrudging afterthought. _The war goddess’s departure has caused a drop in morale. The city feels her absence._

Oh, how sad, Brasidas wants to write back - you have lost your symbol? Try losing your heart, the thing that has lived at your core for years. Try spending every moment in the shadow of her, knowing her laugh and her strength and the stretch of her around you, and knowing that it is a memory.

Try knowing that there is a good chance of _some_ becoming _all_ , even though she was changing still, before your eyes - that she was becoming something new every moment, something you could not wait to love.

“Wait,” he calls after Nemesis as she ducks under the tent-flap, “wait. If you can, I need a message delivered to Akanthos, the city on the easternmost headland - ”

“I know it,” she says, and holds out her hand. “I’ve seen my sister's maps."

She goes into the night with Brasidas's conditions for Akanthos’s surrender, laid out in painstaking construction: a nested lattice of terms, reasons, and evidence, crafted with every art he knows. _Live no longer in fear of Athenian domination, stand free of coercion and colonization, halve your tribute in coin and timber, and know that at the end of this war, you will be released from all your ties to Sparta and her allies…_

He settles in after that, prepares the army to dig its heels and winter in the hills while the city deliberates. But it’s little more than a week before Nemesis darts into his tent again, flinging the flap shut behind her and turning on him in a windstorm of cornstraw hair and muted panic.

“No,” she says flatly.

“No?” Brasidas blinks, stylus suspended mid-sentence. “What happened? They would not see you?”

“They saw me.”

From the waist-rope of her _peplos_ Nemesis produces a narrow scroll tied with long dried purple leaves, the flower they call bear’s breeches in the north, and holds it out to him as if she cannot wait to be rid of it.

“The Akanthan council,” she says, solemnly, “declines your offer, and respectfully requests that you leave Chalkidike before their regents become aware of your presence.”


	23. eunoia

Truthfully, there is something in a crisis that Brasidas enjoys. Something pleasurable in a sudden stagger, a crease in a carefully-laid plan. When there is catastrophe, when panic floods the air like brine through a sinking galley, a curious sense of calm settles in him, and in that calm there is room for thinking and creativity.

And it has been some time since something truly baffled him.

Independence. Sovereignty. The right to keep one’s own wealth, to labor for oneself and one’s neighbors without fear of levy or requisition. Agency and self-determination, a pledge of protection and non-interference, the opportunity to unyoke oneself from the hands of tyrants and colonizers: are these not good things?

Brasidas crushes the heel of his hand to his forehead, to that spot between his brows where the skin always seems to crawl and squirm. He has misunderstood something, obviously. Some cardinal facet of human nature. A need so basic and powerful that it sits above freedom.

“ _Why?_ ” he repeats aloud, cross-legged on the groundcloth of his tent and hunched over Tisiphone’s maps in a bath of flickering lamplight. The triple peninsula of Chalkidike has begun to look less like a game-board and more like a grave. “Why would they not bargain or counter-offer? Why would they refuse me so much as an audience?”

Lysander shrugs, leans down from his perch on Brasidas’s low olivewood war table, and threatens him with a jug of wine.

“ _No,_ ” Brasidas growls, covering the mouth of his cup. “I need to think.”

Lips pulled back in a wily grin, Lysander tips the jug, keeps tipping it - making Brasidas curse and yank his hand away as wine splashes over his fingers. “You think better when you’re drunk.”

“I doubt that,” Brasidas says. But he drains the cup anyway. “So - there is something else that ties Akanthos to Athens. Something we have not thought of. And I’d wager the same is true of any other colony on the headlands. If we can find out what that bond is, and break it…”

Slouching back on the table, eyes narrowed in scrutiny, Lysander pretends to tally numbers on his fingers. “And how many bonds do you think you can break before Athens sails up the coast?”

“I don’t think Athens is coming.” Brasidas hums in thought and touches the map. Runs his finger from coast to cape to camp, tracing leylines of information. “Alekto’s hunters have been watching the docks. And I have runners on the promontory, watching for sails to the south. No ships have left Akanthos, or been sighted on the Aegean, since they gave their reply.”

 _Leave Chalkidike,_ they wrote, _before our regents become aware of your presence_.

Something odd about the way it was phrased. Almost like a whisper, a murmur behind the hand, as if -

It swims out at him from the rising hum of the wine in his belly. “Fear.”

Patiently, Lysander probes: “Of us?”

“Of _Athens_. Of their rulers, who terrify them more than any foreign army could. Yes, of course - ” Excitement brings him up to a crouch. He feels alert, viper-sharp. “Sparta is quick to punish disloyal vassals with death. Why would the greatest empire in Hellas not do the same?”

Lysander frowns. “Akanthos has not been disloyal yet.”

“No, but they have had a Spartan army on their land for a month. Our agents have been in their city. They've corresponded with us. They didn't muster for defense or try to drive us off, which means they've at least _considered_ my offer…”  

“Considered and rejected,” Lysander muses, leaning forward to look at the map. Brasidas pretends not to notice him refilling the cups. “Even if they wanted to declare for us, they would not, because they don’t believe we are a match for Athens.”

The truth falls out of Brasidas before he can catch it. “We aren’t.”

Lysander glares down at him. “Inspiring.”  

“Better to be honest.” No use mincing words, no use for that old Spartan hubris when thousands of lives now depend on clear eyes and humility. “Akanthos is a dock-town, barely a week’s sail from Piraeus. And you know we have no teeth on the sea. Even if we were to raise palisades and meet Athens on land - ”

That terrible future unfolds in his mind: the defection, the clash, the bloodshed. Death first in Chalkidike’s rich forests as Brasidas’s neophyte army breaks discipline and fumbles their formations, then in the streets of Akanthos as civilian deserters are hunted down like hares. Families and associates murdered, every possibility of insurrection crushed - just to be sure.

“We ask the impossible,” Brasidas murmurs, settling back on his calves. The slash across his thigh, another gift from Pylos, aches faintly. “How can we demand they gamble their lives on unproven strength? What right do we have?”

A snap of ice passes between them. “To free them?”

“To force them to be free, when they might be safer as they are.”

“ _Safer_ ,” Lysander spits. “Yes, I suppose it is safer to be owned. I would sooner die, but maybe you’re right - ” and there is so much venom in his voice that Brasidas flinches - “maybe this is enough for them, to be chained to a post half a world away. After all, if a slave is given a bed, and a family, and crops to tend - like a dog who is free to roam around in his master’s front yard - well, that’s not so bad, is it?”

Brasidas does not dare respond.

 _There_ , says the cold light in Lysander’s eyes and mouth: _I have shown you something wrong. Something you can fix, or try to._

_Look away, and what are you?_

“If we do this,” Brasidas says, finally, into the silence, “there is no guarantee it will last. You and I still answer to Sparta. Anything we give, she can take. Who is to say she will not decide, in the end, that she has a taste for rule after all?” He feels suddenly very tired. “The army talks of bringing freedom to the north, of cutting chains, but maybe we are all telling the same foolish lie. Demanding service and loyalty, with freedom at the end of it like fishing bait.”

“The promise Archidamos made,” Lysander says, each word sharp and dark as obsidian. “Is that a lie?”

Brasidas’s heart skips: is it? No, it was sworn before a lawmakers’ council - provided, of course, that they can honor that foolish boast he made in the palace of Sparta months ago. The king has vowed it, which means the state has vowed it, which means: “It’s not a lie.”

Lysander snatches his words out of the air like a hunting bird. Far too quickly, he comes down from his seat on the table, crouching close, crushing the maps under foot and knee. The wild hyacinth curls of his hair, frieze-perfect, gleam in low light like red-bronze brushstrokes. “Then maybe you are the liar here.”

Unconsciously, Brasidas shifts away. Giving ground, which is something of a relief when all he seems to do these days is fight for it. “I don’t - ”

Lysander's voice cuts low and even through the hum of dusk insects and quiet distant conversation. "Do you seek empire?”

Brasidas swallows. “I seek the end of empire.”

“Do you seek power over others?”

“No,” Brasidas says immediately, quick as a parry, and then shakes his head and clenches his jaw and amends: “Yes.”

“Why?”

“To change structures. To break down things that are unjust, and allow them to be remade.”

For a moment Lysander watches him in stillness, in a timeless suspension of crashing water and seabird cackle from above.

And then a look of glee flashes across his face, that mocking smile Brasidas never seems to expect. Pulling back with a breathless chuckle, Lysander adopts a glower of comical intensity and hums in thought and strokes an imaginary beard, and all the tension drains out of the room like wine from a cracked vase.

He really ought, he thinks dully, to stop allowing Lysander to get him drunk.

\---

They plan into the night. The army splits: seven columns of a hundred men sketched in a constellation across the hills of Chalkidike, each within eyeshot of the council-hall of Akanthos, armed not with spears but with torches and pitch and jars of oil.

It will be a single graceful movement, Brasidas hopes - a masterstroke of coordination. It will bring them Akanthos in a single day. And after that: Stagira and Torone and and all the others, each of them easier to sway, easier to gain, as the news spreads in hushed joyful whispers through the north - _Athens does not own us._

At Lysander's needling, Brasidas takes the last few hours before dawn to himself. He goes to his tent with worry like a stone in his stomach, mind racing and gut churning, and thinks himself to sleep.

And dreams of her.

It’s summer here, loose and hot. Sweat glows on every brow. The women go bare-breasted, the men with cloths loose around their waists. The streets are filled with carts and flowers and racing children.

And there in the acropolis, sitting on her heels on the opposite curve of the _pankration_ arena, tall and sun-brown:

Kassandra, who never needed to fight for her ground. Who simply _was_. Who walked through the world with bladed focus, with the easy high-shouldered lope of a mountain lion, and watched it part before her.

Her hands hang loose and ready between her knees. Her smile lights the world. She crouches there taut as a cat tensed to leap, with webs of muscle all around her like fishing net. As he disrobes, her golden gaze rakes across him like fingernails, like a phantom strigil carving greedy lines down his back and thighs.

He has never thought to be proud of his body, a thing as common in Sparta as short nails and clean hair. But what is the alternative, when his alone draws her eyes?

At a shout or horn-blast or some other distant and echoing signal, he drops to a crouch (foolishly; if he cannot outpace her awake then why would he in a dream, where you move as if through marshwater?). She’s on him in a blink, faster than life. But there is no hurtling fall, no hard ground or taste of bloodshock in his nose - just a full and heady sense of calm as she presses her chest to his, her mouth to his neck, his back to cool marble.

He turns them around for leverage. Presses a knuckle between her legs, a blunt rhythmic weight on the hood. She’s in his ears with voiceless breaths, every part of her tight, from the iron of her stomach to her hand on his skull to her fingers wrapped around him. She pulls him forward and to the ground, and guides him into her, and he works in her - feeling the burn of his stomach, of muscles not used. Driven out of sense, she talks nonsense to him, and he feels full to bursting with love: love of the fit of her hips in his hands, of his name in her mouth and his thoughts in hers. Fire curls through him like vines gripping his organs, storm surge spilling up through docks and swollen earth.

“I want this,” he says, outside himself. “Fuck - Kassandra - I want this.”

“You have this,” she breathes against his lips, and gods help him, it’s her voice, her _true_ voice, not the counterfeit whisper that haunts him in daylight.

But... 

“No,” he says - and they have so little time, so dizzyingly little, he must choose his words carefully - “not _this_ , not a memory I’ll barely remember. I want this forever. I want this real. I wish we had left together.”

Kassandra smiles. The fan of her hair beneath her seems infinite in the dark. “I don't believe that.”

“Why not?”

“If we had - ” Her nails scrape down his back. Her palm presses flat on his spine, pulling him deeper, and the searing shock turns his vision to stars. “It would have torn me to pieces. I would have seen the dead in my dreams. The old and the young in rotting towers with poison and plague on their lips. Every day, I would have seen the evil I turned from. I would have seen Phoibe’s face, and the face of every other person my brother has taken.”

Every person he

will

take.

“People turn from evil every day,” Brasidas hisses. “They close their eyes. They think of themselves and their families, and they live good, peaceful lives. Why not us? Why this mindless sense of duty?”

“You know the reasons,” Kassandra says, almost reproachfully. “You know seven hundred of them, and now thousands more.” She touches his jaw, kisses it. “And if you didn’t - if you truly wanted to go, after everything we’ve seen, everything we know -

Then you would be different.

You would not be the man

I love.

You would not be

you.

And then there is no heat, no scorching skin against his lips or cherry-metal taste on his tongue. Brasidas wakes in a start, sweating and shivering, and there is only the cold rough groundcloth of his tent, and a painful unfulfilled ache, and the slow staggering return of reality.

Trade liberation for cooperation. Take a city with words, and not steel. Force people to cut their bonds, to accept freedom and all the dangers that follow it, so that others might do the same.

Is it right?

He asks it. Opens his mouth and says it aloud, into the dark of his tent, to her: “Is it right?”

Kassandra does not answer.

\---

In the morning, Brasidas lays his weapons on his bedroll, dresses simply in an urchin-purple _chiton_ pinned at the shoulder with a wrought-silver bear’s breech flower, and goes alone to the council-hall of Akanthos.

It’s not at all what he expected. Not a dark airless mausoleum but a white-stone chamber filled with silver urns, open and windowed and flooded by the smell of the sea. A different sort of palace, where the light is good and the seats are plentiful and they have wealth enough for solid marble walls rather than limestone and rock-dust stucco. A place not meant for war.

Most gratifyingly, there are no Spartans here. Experimentally, Brasidas un-clasps his hands behind his back, letting them hang free by his sides, and replaces them a few moments later when he cannot think of anywhere else to put them.

A tall man with overlong limbs and a bronze band in his white-gold hair - their chief governor, presumably - steps forward. Brasidas bows; the man does not.

“You are misplaced, son of Sparta,” he says in a brusque voice, a commander’s voice. “You have disregarded our wishes by coming here. You have put us all in danger. Akanthos neither wants nor needs your charity.”

“It is not charity,” Brasidas says, “but necessity.”

“Necessity for whom?”

“For all of us.”

Brasidas turns to address the council. Around him, guardsmen churn and bristle and level their spears; he puts his hands up in a show of peace. “Look. I have come to you without weapons or armor - a troubling thing for a Spartan, as I’m sure you know. But I will say it again and again, as many times as it takes: accept my terms. You will keep your constitution and your governors. Sparta will take no sides in your internal affairs. I will personally assume your protection. And as for tribute - ”

From behind him comes the tall governor’s voice, stretched tight as a harp string. “We have _heard_ your offer, interloper - ”

“No, you have not, because I have changed it. Sparta will make no claim on your goods. She will not eat of your crops, nor demand the take from your mines and quarries. And we have no use for your timber or pitch. Sell it north, or close your mills - whatever the decision, let it be for Akanthos alone. Do you understand what I am saying?”

A rustle of unease goes through the council. Brasidas has given enough speeches to know it was a perfectly passable one, delivered clearly and with sincerity, but still they sit in silence. Watching him, and each other, and saying nothing.

Finally, the governor sinks into his chair and rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. “You cannot protect us from them,” he says with a trembling sigh.

Proving, once and for all, that fear is heavier than hope.

“Join me outside,” Brasidas says, “please.”

Outside, spread across the horizon in a dark colonnade, seven long black pillars of smoke stretch endlessly into the sky. The governor of Akanthos sways and groans and fights to stay on his feet; Brasidas puts out a hand to steady him.

 _Control the burn_ , rings his own command from the night before. _Under no circumstances are you to let the pitch-fire spread_ \- but he keeps his face neutral.

“It’s true what you say,” Brasidas admits. “I have not won any battles on your land. I have not sunk any ships, or routed any armies. Though I believe the protection I offer is worth your loyalty, I cannot prove it to you.”

He extends his arm to the hills, hand upturned. Holding the lush green land around them in the roughness of his palm. “But I can do this. I can take from you what makes you valuable to your regents: your vineyards, your fields, your great forests. I can starve your people. I can make you desolate.”

Do not turn around. Do not look at the terror in their eyes. Think instead of the endgame, the final state. Think of the day Athens is too weak for war, the day you can leave Chalkidike for good and clap this man on the shoulder and say _look, I have kept my promise…_

“You are weighing your options,” Brasidas says into the turmoil, fighting to keep the chaos sealed inside. “Let me help. You could send for your rulers, or levy your citizens for battle, or kill me here where I stand - " He touches his bare breastbone. " - your lands will burn all the same.”

At last he searches for the governor’s eyes. “Or…”

“Pledge it.” Ghost-grey, Akanthos's governor clutches Brasidas’s arm. “Pledge to this council that your word is good. Pledge that you will uphold the promises you have made.”

A terrible cloud hangs in his chest. Eyes like Odysseus, yes, and a tongue like him too. Craft and lies and art and deception, woven together like filigree, impossible to pick apart.

“I pledge it,” Brasidas says. The words feel heavy in his mouth. “Akanthos will be free.”


	24. agon

Naturally, Sparta is outraged.

 _We gave you specific instructions,_ reads the letter that arrives barely a month after the defection. _Half at least of their crop take, and enough steel for two thousand spears, and marble for the crumbling temple of Athena, and one drachma per head - a reasonable price for protection -_

And, and, and.

Brasidas writes back so intently that the numbness in his arm turns to needles.

I could not risk losing Akanthos, the key to the region. Dismissing our tribute requirements was the quickest way to secure their cooperation, and I will not renege on that promise now. Do not pretend Sparta will starve because of it.

_Total independence is dangerous. We will send a governor to settle disputes in the city and watch for treason. If we are to keep the north, we must leash it._

Disagreed. Fear of surveillance is what drove them to us, and it will drive them from us just as quickly. Sparta did not begin this war to become an empire; our objective was not subjugation but freedom for Hellas. I have not forgotten that, even if our king has.

_We have reviewed the Akanthan constitution, and found it to contain errors of sovereignty, hierarchy, and social hygiene. We will send amendments, so that you may revise the appropriate documents._

Send them if you want. I am very busy.

The ephors do not write him again.

“Keep doing that,” Lysander admonishes, though his eyes contain the usual spark, “and we will be holding off Athens with one hand, and Sparta with the other.”

“Fine. I will fight whomever needs to be fought.” Nerve-pain streaks down Brasidas’s arm, making him curse and smudge a _tau_. “Luckily, you look like you have two hands free.”

“Is that all you have?” Lysander murmurs. He casts a glance around them, scanning for eavesdroppers or friendly spies practicing their craft. “Boastful words? A pretty speech and some oil-smoke won us Akanthos, but I don’t think they will win us much else. What strength backs the promises you’ve made, if not your own?” Dark eyes search him, seeking frailty. “You haven’t won a match against me since you woke from Pylos.”

“Because you always go for my left.”

“Anyone who saw the look on your face when you try to lift your shield would go for your left.” Disapprovingly, Lysander watches Brasidas clench his fist and fight to hide the tremble. “You should let someone write for you.”

That, more than anything, strikes a hollow in him. Why now the sudden sense of grasping, of skill and relevance slipping away from his hands like shy birds? Not so long ago, wasn’t he so awash in talents that he itched to be rid of them?

Brasidas smiles and looks away and grips the pen tighter. “A soldier who cannot fight, and a diplomat who cannot write - what use would you have of me then?”

\---

The second of Chalkidike’s cities comes so easily that Brasidas glances around his tent and waits in wary silence for someone to laugh.

“We met last night, and came to an agreement,” says Akanthos’s white-skinned, ever-weary governor, veins stark in his pale temples. In one of his outstretched hands is a roll of parchment, and in the other a canary-grass pen. “Our sister-city has just sent its last duty across the Aegean. On the condition that you extend to her every allowance you have given Akanthos - immediately, and without revision - Stagira will declare for Sparta.”

Brasidas frowns down at the scroll, thrust at him like a live scorpion. “Because they want what I offer, or because you told them I would burn their fields if they refused?”

The governor stares at him, at the man who has made his life so unbelievably difficult in such a short time, and drops the scroll and pen on the war table with a percussive fatigue.  

“Just fucking sign it,” he says, icily, and through the tent-flap as he leaves comes a spiraling flurry of thick white ash.

No, Brasidas has to remind himself - not ash. Snow. They have snow here in the north.

“What do you think?” he asks, raising his voice to the emptiness of his tent. He flattens his palm on the scroll and slides it open across the table, finding his own words looking back at him, copied in a boreal statesman’s blunt awkward Doric. “This ally we did not even have to fight for - is this real?”

Briskly, Nemesis admits herself through the rear tent-flap and begins to pace the table. Taking Myrrine’s feedback to heart, she has cropped her hair to the root, daubed her face with hearth-soot, and hemmed her clothes at the knee in a determined mimicry of a Chalkidian house-girl.

“Real enough,” she says, running her hand absently across the shorn cornstraw cap of her scalp. “All the towns on the headland saw the smoke. And I made sure they heard of Akanthos’s decision. It would not have been difficult for the council of Stagira to vote in favor of revolt.” Brushing the contract aside, she splays her fingertips on the map beneath, inscribing the oval of their influence neatly in one hand. “But the faster they come, the faster the news will go to Athens. The deeper their fear will cut.”

The sooner Brasidas will need to prove some kind - _any_ kind - of strength.

“This was practice,” he says, and moves to pick up the madder-dyed thorn that stands for Sparta’s army, “the first foothold of many. We’ve spent enough time here; we’ll break camp tomorrow and move on.”

“In what direction? There are a dozen options.” Nemesis blocks him, guarding the army-pin with her outstretched hand. “Let me survey first. I’ll make contact with partisans in the towns on the other headlands, find what allies I can. We should not waste our efforts on any city that will not open its gates for us.”

“I agree, but…” Brasidas retreats for a moment into thought, drawing arcs and distances with imaginary calipers. Moves his soldiers here, his spies there, leaving time for skirmish and debate and negotiation - “There isn’t time. Athens will not want to fight in the winter, but two of their cities have already revolted. Once they begin to see the damage to their war machine, they will not have a choice. I think we must pick the largest of their colonies - the most profitable - and take our chances _now_ , before it turns to open battle.” He stares down at the map, so as not to see the warning in Nemesis’s eyes. “So. There is Torone, on the middle headland, or Mende or Skione to the west…”

Nemesis shakes her head. “None of these will strike the blow you want.”

“What will?”

“I have been told,” she says, slowly, “that the greatest prize is not on the headlands, but farther up the coast. A rich colony built on the mouth of a great river, where they mine gold and silver from Mount Pangaios and harvest enough timber to build a hundred flotillas. All the grain from Skythike passes through its port.”

A howl of white-freckled wind tears through the tent, making them both shiver. Nemesis reaches down, plucks the red thorn from the map, and moves it to the blot of ink that reads, in Tisiphone’s tight blocky calligraphy:

AMPHIPOLIS

“If we take this city,” she says, every word heavy, as if by will she might force him to reconsider, “Athens will notice.”

Brasidas wets his lips, considers the playing field. The weight of decision sits like oil-smoke in his lungs.

“All right,” he says, and at the set of his voice Nemesis looks away in dread. “In the morning, we march for Amphipolis.”

Such begins winter in Chalkidike.

Snow comes like a shock of marble dust across the plains. The army breaks camp and begins its week-long march, passing in awe through the brooks and valleys and egret-feathered forests of Athens’s liege-lands: a stark and motionless beauty foreign to any soul raised in the wet hot south. A strange cushion of silence seems to absorb not only their footfalls but their words and laughter and the scrape of their armor, like a hand cupped over the ears.

Their progress is slow but smiling. Women in wolfskin linger by the path, leaning on their fishing spears, to mimic the trill of nightjars and sparrowhawks. All down the marching line, hoplites break rank to draw patterns in the glades, and at the border of Makedonia Brasidas watches two of Alekto’s huntresses flirt under a curtain of snowfall, spindling hair and loose flax threads through their fingers and smiling at the billow of their breath. Charmed by the winter hush, and by each other.

A wave of memory strikes him, tall as a temple. A sense of orbits and discreet smiles and the thrill of an accidental touch. Thinking of Myrrine’s letter, that single barren word leering at him like a cult symbol, Brasidas swallows down the metal taste of grief and turns back to the column.

The nights grow colder. The pack animals slow and sink, braying alarm with their hooves mired in cold brown slush, and behind it the army leaves a trail of red footprints: a blend of icy mud and blood leached through worn buskin soles. Alekto leads hunting parties into the trees, bringing back deer and then hares and then the wolves themselves, and then nothing at all.

Yet not for a single night does the army camp in silence.

“Sing,” roars a barrel-chested peltast, opening his brawny arms to the sky, shivering in his _chiton_ and breastplate after giving his cloak to his frostnipped brother. “So we are freezing in this miserable wasteland. So we have hunted the forests bare. What better to drive off death than a _paean_ , the Song of Castor - ”

Only they have renamed it the Song of Nemesis, and lift her shrieking and laughing above their shoulders as they dance under the stars.

Cold and hungry and smiling still, they arrive at a quiet crossroads outside a town called Aulon, where a great sparkling lake flows into the sea, and where from the water’s edge you can see the distant lights of a port-city shuddering in the night.

Winter-eyed Tisiphone crouches among them at the fire. Engulfed by Lysander’s thick wool cloak, she unrolls her newest creation across a bed of dry straw. Amphipolis in miniature, rendered with the usual unearthly precision.

“River runs all around it,” she says, her voice tight with the chill, “like a laurel crown. And they’ve built their own Long Wall of sorts, too high to climb. Three ways to get in: west, north, and south. All garrisoned, with more barracks inside.”

“The soldiers you saw,” Brasidas prompts, “Were they Amphipolitan, or Athenian?”

Tisiphone thinks a moment, her fingers on her lips. “Athenian.”

That excites him so much that he nearly leaps up from the fire. An isolated foe, far from home and unable to call for reinforcements: perfect! A chance to remove Athenian influence, to mount a massive daring public rescue, an indisputable show of strength - all without spilling a drop of Chalkidikian blood.

But how to approach? How to ensure victory with this sapling of an army that has never seen battle and cannot move in formation, much less in silence?

Curled on the frozen earth with her knees drawn up to her chin, Nemesis traces the distance between their camp and their target. She taps twice on the midpoint: a scrawl so small it looks like a mistake. “Tell me about this city.”

“Argilos?" Tisiphone rubs her nose, which has turned bright red from sniffling. "More a hamlet than a city. It’s smaller than Pitana, from edge to edge. Nothing of value there that I could see - not even a garrison.”

“But it controls this bridge, here. The one that leads directly across the Strymon to the west gate of Amphipolis.”

Tisiphone peers down at the map. “Aye,” she says, breathing on her hands. “Suppose it does.”

\---

On a mild dry night, under a sky the color of impending storm, Brasidas waits for his spymaster in the cypress grove outside Argilos.

Four days, she said. One to infiltrate the quiet village, posing as an errand-girl, two to find insurrectionists and partisans willing to throw open their neighbor’s gates, and the last to slip out of it under the nose of Argilos’s reviled Athenian governor.

At the end of it, blue linen and bronze helmets will hang on the walls of Amphipolis. The port of Eion will gleam in red banners, its new regalia so bright it can be seen from Akanthos, and the sandy delta at the end of the river Strymon will bloom with fresh frozen corpses.

Brasidas sits and worries and watches the road. Alekto stands guard beside him, silver and patient with her spear across her shoulders: a specter in dark wolfskin.

“If only you could find a leopard,” Brasidas says absently, “you would look like Dionysos.”

The old woman's mouth twitches in laughter. “I would not mind a chariot, or a court of maenads. Or enough wine to dull this ungodly cold.” She jabs the butt-spike of her spear into the earth, grunting against its frozen resistance. The moon plays in her grey hair and rich furs and night-black panther eyes. “What are you doing over there?”

“Oh - ” Brasidas looks down at his supplies. “Learning to write with my off-hand. I think I cannot keep straining my left, or…” He shrugs and holds up the last hour’s handiwork, squinting in the dark. “I think I have reached Kassandra’s level, which is progress, I suppose.”

At the name Alekto’s weathered gaze falls on him. For a while there is silence across the thicket, and some hours later, she says: “One of the girls minding the convoy is my daughter. Too young to hunt or fight, but of course I could not leave her alone in the south. The name she chose for herself was Kassandra.”

Weariness falls on him like an old tunic. “Kassandra is not a god.”

“And yet she is of use to us, even gone. Her name gives strength to those who want it. Do you think she would dislike that?”

“No,” Brasidas admits, and through him passes the whole dizzying sum of her: the mischief of her smile, her impatience, her quick anger, the haunt in her eyes in the rain outside Athens. That slow and heady love for the people she could not abandon. “No, I think she would like that very much.”

Alekto smiles, and nods - and with blistering speed her javelin is up and ready at her shoulder, hooded eyes sharp in starlight, hand outstretched to track some unseen target.

Brasidas leaps to his feet, lifting his shield and hissing at the pain. But behind him - approaching slowly, with hands splayed in peace - is not Nemesis but another woman, short and black-haired, with a powerful frame and a high proud chin and a terribly familiar foxlike patience.

“Brasidas of Sparta,” says Philonoe, inclining her head in greeting. For a dreadful moment Brasidas mistakes the slatted moonlight for her husband's blood, painted across her face and dress like dark red raven wings. “Welcome to the north.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter was supposed to be twice as long and cover twice as much ground, but I have so little time to write these days and didn't want to go 2 weeks without publishing :'( 
> 
> hang in there folks!! thank you for reading, your feedback means the world to me <3 <3 <3


	25. plymira

How long has it been since Brasidas stood at the edge of Arkadia and watched Philonoe and her son vanish into the saddle of the Parnonas?

It was autumn then, he remembers. There was a chill in the air, a welcome relief from hot windless nights and the slide of skin against skin. Which would make it a year, or thereabouts, an unbelievably long and exhausting year in which he has watched his lover stab his friend through the throat, planned a daring escape from his lifelong home, brought Athens to the brink of ruin, averted a plague, been so soundly defeated in battle that his descendants will feel the wounds, stood in delirium at the gates of Hades, taken a fifth of Sparta’s labor force on a fool’s errand, threatened to raze a countryside, and lost something so important to him that he still cannot quite manage to accept its absence.

If anyone could see all these things in his face, Brasidas thinks wearily, it would be Lagos’s widow.

Sure-footed Alekto surges up beside him with her javelin still raised, her voice sharp enough in the silence to make him jump. “Where is the woman who was meant to meet us here? Speak.”

“Your agent is still in the city, with our allied councilmembers. Think of her as a hostage, and me an arbiter.” Philonoe lowers her hands, secure in her leverage. “I have come to decide what Argilos is willing to risk for you.”

Feeling foolish, Brasidas clarifies: “Not for me. For all of Hellas.”

“Yes,” Philonoe says. Amusement glints in her eyes. “I have heard.”

Unimpressed, Alekto raps her spear on the icy dirt. “Decide quickly. I will watch the road.”

“Where is your son?” Brasidas blurts the moment the old woman moves out of earshot, and wonders too late if he really wants to hear the answer.

Mercifully, Philonoe laughs, delighted at the urgency in his voice. “Nilos is safe. And he will be pleased to hear you remember him.”

“Good,” Brasidas breathes, “good. I didn’t expect - well, I thought you would have gone farther north. As far from Kosmos as you could.”

“I tried. It is pretty enough in Thrake, and the cult of Dionysos makes good wine - but I did not find what I was looking for.”

"A place to raise Nilos?"

"A place to live." Philonoe looks into the treeline with utmost disappointment. "Wherever we went, there were… oh, they used all sorts of words. Satraps, petty-kings, priests, chieftains. Different names for the same men, with the same wretched love of land and coin and conquest. Happy to welcome us, so long as I would take their men into my bed and allow them to put a spear in my son’s hand. So we returned here, to Chalkidike. Argilos has been kind to us - even if war seems determined to find us wherever we go.”

Brasidas turns away the stab of guilt. “Why here, and not Amphipolis?”

“And share our streets with hundreds of homesick Athenians?” Philonoe laughs darkly. “Despite everything, Nilos and I are Lakedaimonian. Our skin and accents keep no secrets. I did not flee a nation-eating cult so that we could be speared in the neck by a watchman who did not like the length of our vowels. And you - ”

Brasidas flinches, mortified that the conversation might now turn to him, and to the mission he has begun to find somewhat absurd.

“I don’t need to ask what you’ve been doing,” Philonoe goes on. “Every merchant that comes into town carries news of your mischief. Foraging the woods bare, surrounded by your freemen and huntresses, filling the north with whispers of _liberty for Hellas!_ A far cry from freeing two hostages to save a friend.” She eyes Alekto through the trees. “Though you did have a different bodyguard, last I saw you.”

And then Philonoe slides into a comfortable silence, and as the moments drag on it becomes apparent that she will wait as long as it takes for Brasidas to offer an explanation.

“She,” Brasidas ventures, and pauses. Words, which have always come so easily to him, seem suddenly absent. He has never needed to explain the crater in his heart. “She, ah."

Philonoe waits.

"Kassandra... isn’t here, obviously. I’m not, ah… not certain where she is. There was a battle, and - ”

“There always is. She was not killed, surely?”

 _No_ , Brasidas would have said months ago, _of course not, for the divine cannot die._

How comforting it would be to curl up now beneath that lie.

“I don’t know,” he says.

Philonoe sighs. “That’s a shame. I hoped you, at least, had a corpse to mourn.”

Brasidas looks at the ground. Unable, at the moment, to process the word _corpse_.

“I have a theory about grieving.” Shivering, Philonoe edges closer to the fire and rubs her hands above its crackling warmth. “Not a happy one, unfortunately, if that is what you’re expecting.”

Brasidas swallows. “What is your theory?”

“That you are never done with it. It is not like a bone, broken once and then set; it is like breathing with glass dust in your lungs. It will not disappear - I would not want it to, truthfully - but each day the pain becomes more familiar. Like a baker or blacksmith, you fold the hurt into yourself, until it and you are the same.”

Brasidas contemplates this for a cold and windy moment. “That sounds terrible.”

“I know,” Philonoe says, and draws her furs tight around her shoulders. “All words, in the end. They do not make living any easier. Nilos is lucky to be young; he will forget what he has lost. I am the one who will see the ghost of my husband every time my son chews on his nails.”

Brasidas feels a smile tug at his lips. “Kassandra bit hers, too.”

And the tears come.

“Oh,” murmurs Phila, and opens her small arms. “Come here. Come.”

Brasidas is tall enough that he needs to bend down to get his arms around her back. But still the contact is a bitter reminder that he has not touched another person in some months. Shaking against her, tasting salt, not bothering to bite back anything at all, Brasidas remembers with a sudden choke: “This - this is from Lagos, too. He wanted to hold you again, one more time, but he couldn’t - so - ”

Phila sighs, muffled into his chest. “His dying wish?”

Probably, Brasidas thinks. “Yes.”

“Well,” she says, pulling away, “you are more like a wall than my husband. But consider your duty done.”

Whatever Brasidas might have said to that is clipped by a hollow repeating chime: the distant strike of Alekto’s spear on the ice. An impatient reminder that there is still a deal to strike, and that the weather is changing.

Phila looks up into the trees, where the first drifts of snow have begun to find their way through the canopy. “Your spy is not in Argilos.”

“What?” Brasidas coughs in surprise, his throat still raw. “Why?”

“Because she is in Amphipolis. We have smuggled her through the gatehouse, along with some of the men from our militia. When they see your army coming across the bridge, they will put the west garrison to the sword and open the gates for you.”

As Brasidas searches open-mouthed for the proper words, Phila whistles to beckon Alekto from her perch on the side of the road. “Lagos and I were not so clever, after all. Thinking there was some sort of Elysium just over the mountain, a place of peace where our son would never have to spill the blood of another. Thinking this was the only world that had been ruined by greed. But if I could go back and tell us just one thing, it would be this: if you want a place without war, you must make it yourself.”

\---

The storm crashes down on them, a soundless violence. It is a snowsquall, common in Chalkidikian winter: so heavy that they shatter scaffolds and snuff beacons and collapse clay roofs, and so blisteringly cold that they inspire guardsmen to abandon their rounds.

At the head of the column, Brasidas raises his spear. Ten men behind him, a hoplite does the same, and so on down the line: a chain of visibility through the blizzard that says, silently, _march._ On bloody frostbitten feet they pad across the bridge, across that single precious path to the east, and on the far bank they muster and serry and wait.

A pillar of orange light slashes up through the howl. The glow of a brazier, spilling through the crack of an open gate.

Nemesis, looking very little like a hostage, ushers them inside with a giddy muted smile. With her shorn hair caked in ice and her borrowed furs matted in sharp frozen clumps like urchin spines, she blinks away the snow and opens her arm to the sleeping city.

“Take it,” she whispers.

Like vines through mortar they creep into Amphipolis. Each detachment with its one goal, its single-minded assignment: the only way to maintain discipline on an unmapped battleground where stealth and speed are key and coordination all but impossible.

Lysander and his men deploy at the east gate. Huntresses fan across the battlements, hunched over the city like dark stone chimeras. The garrisons begin to fall, and where she can, Nemesis triages her spies, sending them through the streets in a net of reports and petitions - _south gatehouse secure, more troops needed at the river wall, unrest at the market -_

From the high council-hall at the apex of the city where Amphipolis’s Athenian governor clutches his parchments in pale defiance, Brasidas watches the signal fires come to life in a broken arc across the walls.

“Like stars,” Tisiphone says in awe, “like a beautiful hazy constellation,” and begins to sketch.

Hours later, as rosy dawn splinters through the last flurries of the night, as Brasidas and his advisors laugh in sleepless delirium and crack open amphorae of Thrakian wine to celebrate the victory, a young woman stumbles into the council-hall with a great slash across her breastbone and blood on her hands like thick red dye.

“General,” she says, her voice heavy with lung-fluid. Nemesis dips under her arm to support her. “I have just come from the port of Eion. It was relieved moments ago by seven ships from Thasos. Athens has come.”

\---

“Who do you think he is?” wonders Lysander, as they stand on the south wall of Amphipolis and watch white-sailed triremes bob in the harbor. “All their generals are something else, too. Politicians, or philosophers, or some socialite’s son. As if war occupies only half the mind.”

Nemesis kicks her heels against the parapet and shades her eyes against the morning sun. “Whoever he is, I hope he has powerful friends in Athens. They will not like hearing how easily he lost their greatest treasure.”

“Your spy,” Brasidas says, attempting nonchalance. “Did she see anything peculiar before she escaped? A man in brass armor, perhaps - handsome, with gold beads in his hair…”

Nemesis turns to look at him, her eyes drawn like arrowshot to the raised white ridges of his scar. “My spy would not have left the port if the weapon of Athens had been on one of those ships.”

His heart settles at that, though he knows the relief is temporary.

Athens learns of the loss, and roars.

You can taste its fear in the footfalls of scouts around the perimeter, seeking holes in Brasidas’s defenses, and in the furious horns from Eion every day as insurrectionists die with revolt on their lips. Unacquainted with winter war, ordered into action by a faraway general, legions of blue-cloaked hoplites fan across the peninsulas to protect their remaining holdings and leave mounds of frost-black corpses in their wake. 

Stories arrive by the cartful, bitter in the mouths of red-nosed messengers and shivering bards. They tell of the levies, the requisitions, the new martial law, and of how wherever they go the officers of Athens slaughter Spartan sympathizers in the streets and take their children as servants and camp-slaves.

Each night, when the distractions of the day have faded into cold silence, Brasidas stares at the sky and cannot help but tell himself:

You have done this.

You have endangered Phila, and her son, and every other family in Chalkidike that hoped only for a life of peace. You have spoken into their silence, and brought them war.

Then comes Kassandra, sure as a snowsquall, who has never let him sulk for long.

Then be sure you win it.

The bards, Lysander notices, sing in a strange key, and with foreign melodies. Their cadences hide a certain poetry, a progression that turns the ear, and Brasidas realizes one day that there are meanings hidden in them. He names it steganophony, the art of passing a message with sound - a delightful new puzzle to unravel - and the thrill of breaking it open is almost enough to ease his sleep.

Hidden among those songs of Athenian cruelty Brasidas finds whispers of hope. Invitations for protection, promises of alliance and hospitality: fruit born from the clever seeds of rumor Nemesis and her sisters have sown across Chalkidike. Not only that, but instructions describing where and when to strike, so that the citizens of the north might add their own strength to the effort.

Brasidas breaks his army into detachments and sends them into the hinterlands. Lean, winter-ready, and grouped by family for comfort and safety, they move through the snow and slip through gates opened in secret by eager conspirators. One by one the cities revolt: first Myrkinos and Galepsos and Oesyme in the mountains closest to Amphipolis, and then the ones farther away on the peninsulas, Thyssos and Akrothoi and Olophyxos - so many that even Tisiphone with her minuscule handwriting cannot keep their names from crowding together on the map.

In the bone-cold days of midwinter, Nemesis stands over their war table in the council-hall of Amphipolis and looks at Brasidas in alarm.

“These are not infinite,” she says, hoarse from illness, pinching a red thorn between her thumb and forefinger. “We cannot create fifty more soldiers every time we take a new town. Soon we will need to make unpleasant choices, and decide what we will do when the snow melts.”

But Brasidas has just received another plea for aid. A _skytale_  from Torone on the second headland _,_ perfectly measured on the haft of a Dorian spear, telling of atrocities that rival even Lysander’s toe-curling stories of helot life in Sparta.

 _If you do not send help_ , the message ends, _no matter - we will revolt all the same._

“Torone is only a week’s march away,” Brasidas says. “Even quicker, now that we know the land. And the snow has not melted yet.”

He races south with a hundred hoplites, reaching the peninsula’s frozen edge in days and making camp in the glades near the temple of the Dioskouri.

His spies take Torone in a single night: seven women armed with knives and poison, wrapped in dark shrouds like undead ferrymen. They slip across the cliffs and through the sea wall, finding allies waiting at the postern gate with whip scars across their backs and blood-rage in their eyes.

Together they slaughter the garrison at the vale’s high ground. The signal fire roars embers into the black sky, and Brasidas and his soldiers burst in through the market to seize the sleeping city.

 _If any of you have love for your tyrants,_ he announces when Torone is won, _leave freely with your possessions and your loved ones. We are not butchers, and we will not prevent you._

_Only pass the word as you go. Athens will lose this war._

Before dawn, a beacon to the west bursts to life like the glint off a speartip.

“Who is that?” Brasidas demands, pointing across the sea. “What city is lighting that fire?”

“Skione,” Nemesis says, pacing the battlement and rubbing the cap of her hair with a bright nervous energy. Her cough, diligently ignored for weeks, has turned her voice thick and dark and rough. “We cannot keep this up. There aren’t enough soldiers. Spring is coming, and Lysander will need us back at Amphipolis - ”

“You go.”

She looks at him in disbelief. “What?”

“We’ll split the army. You will take half to Skione, and I will bring the other half back to Amphipolis - ”

“Remind me,” she says, pressing her fingertips to her temples, “did this work for you in Pylos?”

Brasidas feels the color drain from his face. Feels the stab of that word like an awl jabbed into his eye and reminds himself of Phila’s words: _fold the pain into yourself, so that it and you are the same -_ but before he can respond, Nemesis sighs and waves him off. “Yes, go. Decide which half you want to take. When Athens sees that beacon, they will punish Skione, and it will be vile. And I could not live with that, either.”

In Amphipolis, weeks later, watching the snow melt and dreading every day the specter of Athenian sails on the horizon, Brasidas sweeps his forest of red thorns to the ground in frustration and writes to Sparta for reinforcements.

“Shocking,” Lysander drawls, when the answer arrives. “I suppose being an arrogant prick to your king and council _does_ have consequences.”

Brasidas does not laugh.

\---

Two men arrive in the last thawing months before spring, their faces winter-pale against dark robes and thick wool cloaks. Brasidas guesses from their mounts and clothing that they are wealthy, and from their unpleasant demeanor that they are civil servants.

“This one says he is Athenian,” Lysander says, not bothering to hide his skepticism, “and this one Spartan. They claim to be commissioners, sent with news of an armistice.”

“We do not _claim_ anything,” says the Athenian, with a weariness that can only come from enduring one of Lysander’s interrogations. “The truce was signed by both parties two weeks ago. We have only come to inform you, and satisfy ourselves that you plan to abide by its terms.”

From their robes they produce the seals of their authority. On one, the royal _lambda_ of King Archidamos, and on the other the blue owl of Athens, with a crude and blocky signature that says _Kleon, son of Kleanetos._

“Vacate the room,” the Spartan says to Lysander. “This is a discussion for diplomats, not mongrels.”

Lysander spits at the Spartan’s feet.

Before the four of them can come to blows, Brasidas holds up a hand. “Lysander will stay. Say what you will, or leave. It doesn’t matter to me.”

Not for the first time, the commissioners look at each other with a curious shared caution.

“We will spare your warrior’s mind,” says the Athenian, delicately, “from the finer details of the armistice. Only know this: you are to cease all activity in the headlands of Chalkidike. You will remove your soldiers from each city you have garrisoned here in the north, and return immediately to Lakonia.”

I smell Kosmos in it.

The Spartan, evenly: “The cities you have taken will be returned immediately to Athens, and their tribute and payments reinstated. Including, of course, the one in which we stand.”

It’s a scent like snakes.

Like sweet sick perfume.

“Further movements against any Athenian holdings will constitute an act of aggression, and nullify the armistice.”

It draws you in, and it bites.

“How long is this truce meant to last?” Brasidas asks.

“Until further notice.”

“Is there possibility for a permanent peace?”

“Not as such.”

Brasidas’s mouth twitches. _Mind your fucking expressions._ “And what will become of the people in those cities, if I return them to your care?”

“That,” says the Athenian, evenly, “is not your business.”

None of them speaks. Through the skylight above comes sunlight, bright quiet sunlight, drawing out every crag and crease in the two men’s faces and casting them like dark stiff theater masks against the empty council-hall.

“No,” Brasidas says.

The commissioners share a glance.

“I will honor no truce,” he continues. “I will not let you _pause_ the war. I will not let you rest your eyes and come back later, brighter and bloodier, so that you can poison new crops of children with lead or glory. No, the war will _end_ , because _I will end it, you fucking Kosmos dogs_ \- ”

And they leap for him.

The calculations are instantaneous. Two paces between him and the Athenian, seven between the Athenian and Lysander, ten or so between Lysander and the weapons he has left at the doorframe, and gods know how many between Brasidas and his own shield, that cursed heavy thing he can barely lift without feeling sick with pain…

What if Kassandra were to appear, just now?

If she had not been killed at Pylos, or ascended to the stars with her demon-brother. If she had only been taken away so that she could not meddle - meaning to return, all this time, but unable. Just as numb with longing as he has been, just as inspired, as heartsick, as defiant.

What if she were to descend from the skylight before him, black shadow on crisp cold winter sun, and fall upon his assassins with the force of a cataract? If the two of them were to topple forward, slammed to the ground, dead in an instant with her weapons through their throats, and if the blood were to spit forth over the marble in long jagged barbs like wounds in a snowfield?

Brasidas closes his eyes and waits. For a dagger through his eye, or the swift bite of a _kopis_ in his gut, or Lysander’s shout of grief and rage. Whichever comes first.

Brasidas.

_Brasidas._

But it rings differently.

“Brasidas.”

Hands on his cheekbones. Thumb brushing his lip. A gentle touch, as if too much force will shatter him.

Brasidas opens his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Kassandra says, and there are tears in her eyes, _tears_ of all things, bright and slick on her cheeks and jaw - “I’m sorry to come back, after so long. I have no right. You must have buried me long ago, found new joys. Mourned, and let go.”

“No,” Brasidas sighs, touching her high wet cheekbone, certain that this is the most truthful thing he has ever said. “I only missed you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the fact that I can say this chapter is even 60% historically accurate leads me to believe that the single primary document we have about this war is HEAVILY fictionalized


	26. telos

“I love you.”

Now that, Brasidas thinks, is a strange thing to hear in a dream. Especially one of _his_ dreams: those frightful canvases painted with ichor and gold leaf, farces set to a silent chorus. Should there not be some kind of danger? A battlefield black with blood and char, or a grotesque icon of death with a pen-punctured throat, or a wounded mother daring him to prove that he is different, somehow, different from the rest…

But there is only soft light. No demons or accusations, only furs beneath him and a warm naked body in his arms and Kassandra above him with her unbound hair brushing his nose, saying:

“I love you.”

All his smiles since Pylos, Brasidas realizes, have been acting. Crude and clumsy disguises: incomplete scaffolds all built on the memory of this. When a smile is real, it surges up through you like caldera-fire, so bright it burns your throat on its way out, and no amount of study or spycraft will keep it hidden.

He reaches up to touch the scar on her lip. Traces the cut of her jaw, her neck, the long hard line of her shoulder. Closes his eyes and opens them again - just to be sure.

“I love you,” Kassandra says again, pointedly.

“Yes,” Brasidas chuckles. “You've mentioned that.”

“I have so many of them,” she says in wonder. “Every time I say it, there is another one ready to take its place - as if they were all stopped up in me, like a cork has been taken out. If I keep saying them, I wonder if they will run out? I love you, I love you, I - ”

Brasidas laughs, and feels it rumble in his chest, deep and real against her hands. “I hope not.”

He wants to flip her. To press her into the bed, her body gloved in his - a weight that, she has said, makes her feel safe. But when he slides his hand to her waist for leverage, an old and practiced movement, pain snaps through his shoulder. Kassandra seizes on it like a falcon in a killing stoop, so quickly it must be unconscious, locking his elbow in hers and levering a thigh around his flank. Pinning him back into the furs, nose to nose, with her heart fleet and strong against his.

“He did this,” she says, and lays her hand on his scar.

Brasidas nods. “Yes.”

She shifts on him. Releases her joint-lock and runs her fingers down his left forearm, along the bones of his hand. “Can you feel that?”

“A little," he says, concentrating on the sensation. "It's numb, mostly, but if you use your nails - like that, yes - then it feels like insect legs, or needles. It’s not much use anymore." He drums the fingers of his right hand against her flank. "But I think I am making progress with this one.”

"Oh?" Her eyes glint up at him, dawnlight splintered in honey. “Progress in what?”

Brasidas shows her.

Days could pass here, he thinks as she arches against him - her breath an eager rush against the hiss of the surf, her open mouth pressed to his throat, tasting his pulse. Days or years, and he would not know it.

Inside this sun-drowned room is his heart. In this bed is everything he has.

But how can that be? If everything is here, tangled in him with her sunglow eyes, then how can there be more just outside the door? How can there be so many tasks and debts: lives in his hands, promises to keep, boasts to honor? All the bets he has cast, strewn about Chalkidike like bone-dice?

It simply does not add up.

He lies atop her now, his head cushioned on her chest and his arms wrapped around her ribs, and watches a low note of regret simmer in her eyes. A deep shadow in the light of her face, like a bird passing before the sun.

“What happened in Athens?” Brasidas asks.

His head rises and falls with Kassandra’s sigh. “Isolation and mind games. New scars. Things I would sooner forget.”

“Then why were you sorry to come back?”

“I told you, didn't I?”

“Yes, though I think what you told me was not entirely true.”

Kassandra looks away.

“You said you had no right,” Brasidas murmurs. “You said I must have buried you, forgotten you - but you know I would not. Even if you had been away a hundred years - if you had come back at the end of my life, with white hair and skin like olive bark - even then, I would not have let you go. You know that, so...”

Still her fingers thread through his hair, steady and silent and anything but idle.

What does Phila do when she wants an answer and has not gotten one? When she knows there is more beyond the surface, but does not urge, for to press too hard might misshape the truth? Ah, yes -

He waits.

"I knew, of course,” Kassandra says, softly. “I knew, but I hoped otherwise. I hoped you might take the choice away from me. I wanted - ”

She swallows down the gravel in her voice, and Brasidas pulls himself up to lay beside her. He buries his nose in her neck and rests his hand on her collarbone, which in the cant of their sheets, the mute tactile language forged by years of warmth and months of longing, means _tell me._

_Tell me, for it is safe here, no matter what you say._

“I fought him,” she breathes, “at Pylos, over your body - I fought until the Spartan privateers beached their ship and took you away, and then I fought until Athens swarmed the island, and then until Deimos and I almost killed each other. And when we both collapsed from the smoke, Kosmos took us back to Athens, and they tried to unravel me. I think their goal, in the end, was to make of me what they made of my brother. To have us mad and obedient - their two pet war gods.”

Thinking of it brings a shiver to the base of Brasidas’s spine. A matching set, spear and shield. The weapons of Kosmos.

“They would not let me sleep,” Kassandra says, so quietly that a seabird cry could swallow her voice. “They used glass knives, and drugs - viper venom or lotus, or _pharmaka_ , witch herbs from Aiaia - hoping, I think, that I would break more easily. When none of that worked, they sent Deimos to speak to me, and I learned who he is. I looked into him.”

“What did you see?”

"All the things he hates about me."

 _Envy is not the same as hatred_ , Brasidas might have said once. But it seems terribly insufficient now: a pale platitude now that he has felt the bite of that envy. "Like what?"

Dead laughter puffs Kassandra’s chest. "So many things. Where should I start? That I can sleep through the night. That I can smile, and it would not be an affectation. That pleasure, for me, is not woven together with pain, and that I have love to give - to my family, my people. That I can know this, a touch from someone I love - ” She moves against him, covers his hand with hers - “without feeling that my skin is crawling away from me.”

Kassandra turns and shudders and curls against him, as if angry that she cannot get any closer.

“He is my shadow,” she murmurs. "What brightens me only makes him darker. And now that you have put a knot in Kosmos's plans, they will come to Chalkidike, and they will come with all the might of Athens behind them - "

And now, Brasidas thinks - though nothing at all could tempt him to say it out loud - now Deimos will come too, for his sister is the center of his whole world.

 _I’m sorry_ , she said yesterday, in tears.

Brasidas smiles. An easy thing, meant to disarm. “Well, you will just have to stay close to me. On my left, preferably.”

“Or,” Kassandra says, “I could ask you to stay here, when they come.”

Neither of them breathes.

“I could ask you to disappear," she goes on, with a gentle unflinching fear in her eyes. "To feign a feud with Lysander and storm off to your tent. Play the quick-tempered Achilles, too proud to fight, and send your lover in your place.”

Brasidas tastes that future for a moment. Sifts it through his teeth like a draught of thick sweet wine, tasting the outcomes. He could disappear, yes, and let Kosmos have their armistice. The war machine would breathe again. The cities of Chalkidike would be returned to Athens, and all the partisans put to the sword - the beacon-lighters, the door-openers, Phila and her son and the pale governor of Akanthos.

The army would fight, of course, for the Styx itself could not cool Lysander’s passions. Seven hundred helots would die nameless in the north or return to Sparta to serve out their lives in rags and rage, and Brasidas would not care, would not care at all…

A momentary freedom. So lovely and distant that it might be written on a map beside Oinotrian vineyards and the kaleidoscopic colors of Persia.

Frowning in mock offense, breaking the spell, Brasidas says: “I have never heard anything so absurd.”

Kassandra laughs and closes her eyes. “That I would lead your army in your stead?”

“That you, in this metaphor, would be Patroklos.”

Distant voices and morning tide. Outside his bedroom window, through the flood of white dawn and sea savor, Amphipolis begins to wake. Idly, Kassandra thumbs the hair at his temple, which he knows from Lysander’s arch observations over the last few months has begun to grey - but there is work to do, and so before the scratch of her nails on his scalp can put him to sleep again, Brasidas lifts himself up and kisses her as deeply and honestly as he knows how.

“I love you,” he says.

\---

The preparations begin.

Brasidas calls back his war-leaders from their posts across Chalkidike. Men and women who rose to command out of necessity, children who barely learned how to fight before they learned how to lead - and Nemesis, who has stayed in Skione to practice her generalship, a proud red-fanged wolf guarding her den. He instructs them to spend their coin on _misthioi_ from the surrounding states, to buy peltasts from Thrake and slingers from Rhodes. To dress them in Spartan helmets, for illusion’s sake, but to return before season’s end, for he will need his best and most loyal at Amphipolis when the snow melts.

They have a month, he guesses. A month before pitch-black hulls darken the water, before all the tensions of the winter come crashing down like snow from a bending bough.

He calls the people of the mainland into Amphipolis, whose high stone walls are better protection than the feeble palisades that guard its sister cities. With escorts to clear their passage - watched in fear by Athenian infantry in the hills, too few and too scattered to attack - they spill in through the gates: women with makeshift weapons and men with their children on their hips, proud rebels all shouting _freedom, freedom for Hellas!_

Under snowmelt and warming air, they stand shoulder-to-shoulder and manage the streams of refugees. The army delights in Kassandra's arrival, crowding around her and greeting her with ovations and warm embraces like an old friend returned from travel. In his periphery Brasidas watches her with them, watches her laugh and roughhouse and turn around at the touch on her shoulder: Alekto, draped in wolfskin, holding her daughter’s hand to guide her through the crowd.

“She has taken your name,” he hears Alekto say, fondly, her voice cutting through the tumult. “I thought she should meet you.”

Kassandra looks at Brasidas over a canopy of heads. Her mouth is slack with surprise, her eyes wide and humbled. He grins and tips his head towards the girl - _yes, talk to her_ \- and with a smile Kassandra crouches before her with a palm out in greeting.

A woman says, behind him: “Real Kassandra, who is not a god. I was _sure_ she was dead.”

It’s low and rough, a familiar growl scarred over with sickness. The voice of a woman too moved by her mission, too bewitched by the growth of her own skill, to let herself rest. “Nemesis,” Brasidas says, and grasps her forearm with genuine relief. “It’s good to see you again. Welcome to the front.”

“And what a front it is." Amused, Nemesis eyes the roar and crush around them. Her scalp, freshly shaved, bears a hatch of new scars like raised pink fishing net. “Are you planning to arm the children, too? Oh, stop - don’t look like that. It was a joke.”

Brasidas is too glad for her presence to complain. He has begun to consider it a game of numbers: each commander a unit of competence, and each of those units a precious calculable increase in hope.

“How are you liking generalship?” he asks, as if it were not obvious.

“It suits me, of course - though I have discovered that spying and war-command are very different. I think I am beginning to understand the way you think, the decisions you must make…” She smirks at him. “All I need now, to be a true Spartiate, is to strip naked and beat Lysander senseless in front of all his peers.”

Brasidas winces. “I suppose I should tell him I am sorry for that.”

“Why? To heal his ego?” Nemesis dismisses his guilt with a gesture, and in her voice Brasidas hears something more than just disdain for the pride of young men. “What would he have gotten, if he had won instead? A sneering accolade, a nicer apartment, a brighter breastplate. And years later, when it mattered most, we would have no ally in the halls of the king - only a man who was beaten by a slave, who has no power at all.”

A ferocious yell from down the promenade raises the hair on Brasidas’s neck. The last family from Argilos has entered the city, and the time has come to close the gates. In celebration the huntresses have begun a chant, taken by the passion of the refugees’ mantra: _freedom for Hellas, freedom for all Greeks, Athens will fall…_

“I know the structures we live in,” Nemesis says, watching the cheer with a sharp hooded smile. “I know how each victory, each small blow, is swallowed and smoothed and made meaningless. I know that for the spark to catch, it cannot just be men like Lysander winning duels against men like you. It must be undeniable.” She looks at him, a tight vulpine focus seething in her eyes. “So I will make sure that we go home singing of victory. I will make that old fool on the throne of Sparta look at us, and see our power, and tell us we are free.”

The news comes that night. Kleon of Athens, the man whose signature Brasidas saw on Kosmos’s failed armistice, sails for the port of Eion with thirty ships, three hundred horsemen, twelve hundred heavy infantry, and a honey-eyed man with bright brass armor and gold beads in his hair.

“He would have come anyway,” Brasidas insists, confusing nearly everyone at war council. “This is Kosmos’s battle. Kleon is here, and Deimos guards Kleon. Nothing would have stopped him getting on that ship.”

“Yes,” Kassandra says. But she does not look at him.

Lysander drums the war table with impatient fingertips. “Well spotted,” he snaps. “Do you have a plan, or not?”

“Of course I have a plan,” Brasidas says.

\---

By all accounts, Kleon of Athens is the ideal opponent. A demagogue, unskilled and untested in war: a proud vain creature who feeds on ignorance and preys on fear and loves nothing more than praise.

What does a man do, when he is a coward with an audience?

He shouts the loudest. He beats his shield with the greatest fervor. He is so terrified to appear afraid that he does the boldest thing, the most absurd thing, so that when they judge his worth in the aftermath, no one will be able to say that he ran.

In the splintered hours before dawn, in a ritual so old that they barely need to speak, Brasidas sits with Tisiphone on the highest watchtower of Amphipolis and learns the battlefield. Highlands all around, and rocky difficult terrain save for the path to Eion. To the north and east, the natural barriers of Lake Kerkinitis and Mount Pangaios, and a low gentle hill to the south that Kleon will use to plan his movements.

From here he will look down into the city. From here he will seek the heart of Sparta’s army. Like any stripling at war, thinking that the greater numbers decide the battle, he will throw his twelve hundred men at them and stand back to watch them feed.

Brasidas puts five hundred troops at the east gate, where Kleon will see them, and two hundred at the south postern, where he will not.

It will go like this:

The main body, under Lysander’s command, will wait to form ranks until the first of Brasidas’s signals comes from the south gate. They will move in practiced disorder: escorting civilians to shelter, mustering in crooked lines and failed serries, scrambling for their weapons and armor. To any observer, they would appear woefully incompetent - a natural thing to expect of Sparta’s helot army, amateur soldiers who have never stood in a real battle.

The north gate will lie ajar, as if in careless neglect. An invitation to strike.

Kleon will bring his army around. Suspicious of the lure, and rightly so - thinking he should attack, but unsure where. Behind the south gate, pressed against the wood and stone in silent compact layers, Brasidas and his two hundred hoplites will wait. And when the army of Athens is arranged just so, split and stretched across the palisade walls as they wait for their commander to make a decision -

 _It will not work, surely_ , say the glances his advisors cast each other around his war table. It is a plan of comical complexity, like a stage play performed across the length of a stadium. Surely war cannot be as calculable as this - moving this pawn here, that pawn there, like a neat game of _petteia_? And Brasidas begins to doubt too, before Kassandra puts her hand to his back and says, with a loud and public pride: “I told you - you were made for this.”

Maybe so, Brasidas thinks. Just as Lagos was made for logistics, and Kassandra for strength, and Phila for rebellion, so was I made for puzzles, for the strategy that only comes in war.

That has nothing to do with Sparta, and everything to do with me.

Now they stand packed against the south gate of Amphipolis, Brasidas and his two hundred hoplites, with Kassandra gripping his hand in the churn of shields and breastplates and nervous sweat. Above them, on the battlements, hawk-eyed Nemesis and her sisters wait to deliver their signals.

Closer: the thunder of footfalls outside the gate. Ginger steps, and faraway orders, saying _the north, move to the north!_

The spring sun passes overhead, an abominable heat.

“Wait,” Brasidas says to his shock troops, and listens to them whisper it through the lines. Hears the soldiers outside shift, and quiet, and begin to murmur. “Let them realize what is about to happen. Let them panic.”

The signals come. Mute banners unfurled like bright white wings, and a single piercing shout from Nemesis. From the north comes a distant clatter of whooping and weapon-drum: ostentatious battle cries, meant to shock. Outside the the south gate, close enough to touch, the chaos begins.

“This summer will be good,” Kassandra murmurs, as the men begin to open the gates. “The games, the flowers. It will be a reprieve. A celebration of love.”

For a single wild instant, Brasidas thinks again of retreat. Feels the pull of peace, of her body in his arms, of the earth bending under his feet... 

But then the battlefield opens up before him like a morning glory. Kassandra pulls him to her and kisses him fiercely - her hand on his heart, her thumb pressed to the pound of his pulse - and it makes him feel immortal.

Roaring, spitting fire, made divine by love, Brasidas goes to war. 

_\---_

_War spares the coward, not the brave._

_\- Anakreon_


	27. kassandra

These are things I will not have again:

Warm eyes. Secrets in lamplight. A mouth soft as petals. Your laugh, rich and sweet as Chian wine. A voice that could crash or whisper and shake my bones all the same. Scarred hands, strong and wood-rough, and crow's feet that counted your smiles. I watched them grow, as you wished to watch mine.

The quiet comfort of your presence. With you, I was enough; I did not think myself lacking. I was nothing I did not want to be.

Shoulders like ship ropes in my hands. Arms that were a harbor to me, a home. Beauty in motion and repose: a strong body that defied the world and yielded to me. Anyone else would say, mistakenly, that the treasure of you lay on the outside.

Our hill in Sparta, that secret bluff at the foot of Athena’s temple where I first began to love you.

Your kisses. The drum in my heart when you looked at me, a vast chest-emptying pound. Before you, I had thought it a fiction. Your hands on my chest, my back, my collarbone. Your fervor for learning every piece of me. The tickle of your beard against my lips and thighs. Your body on mine, a gentle weight, and the precious sound of you loving me, losing yourself in me.

Pride. Resentment. You thought them both unbecoming, and so they hid behind your eyes like fish among urchins. You hated where we were born - hated to love our home with its fragile honor and deep cracks, its tall spires of legend and tradition that covered our people in scars. You hated the structures that bound us, which allowed us a little freedom, a little slack in our irons, and asked us to call it happiness. That deep disappointment spilled from your eyes, a frustration I could not heal.

Your restless, relentless mind. The safety of you at my back. How you always knew I was there, and I you, without looking, just by the change in the air. The way we talked idly of death as if it were a faraway thing, of escape as if it were real. The puzzles you loved to solve, and the quick deft work of your hands, and the way you could not hide what you felt, the way your hope and fear and purpose shone out of you like splintered light.

There are more things. As many as the tides, as all the souls in this world and the next. It would not make sense to list them all.

\---

 _Wait_ , they say, whenever I tell them this story.  _Where is the rest of it? You’ve left something out, forgotten something_ \- as if forgetting were possible.

Good. That is how I felt, too.

\---

Sunrise in Amphipolis.

It was still and hot. It smelled of terror and victory. There was so much blood on my hands that it felt like armor, like a second skin. In that stifling heat I screamed on red sand and held you close, so close, thinking:

_How?_

Minutes ago, this was you. These eyes were yours, these powerful shoulders, this hero’s heart. Now they are nothing.

All your strength, snapped like lyrestring.

I have spent my life in rejection of godhood. I have spurned it, spit on it. I have burned icons and shattered shrines and cursed the divine for their small whims, those fleeting offenses that cost mortals their lives and bodies. But in that moment, alone on the sand, I thought it all a nightmarish mistake.

You felt so near to me. Your skin was not yet cold. Maybe a god could have pulled you back, I thought. Could have reached out and seized you from the air, spit in veiled Death’s empty eyes and said, no, you cannot take this one. A daughter of ancients needs him still.

 _The gods do this_ , I said to you once,  _in all our stories_. What did I intend - a warning, or a message? Even then, I thought to lift the burden of leaving off my back and onto yours. But I am the one who threw the discus. I saw it fly. Couldn't I have saved you, if I had not been so selfish?

It was like a nightmare. It would not end. Every moment like a hammer, like drowning. I fought to keep my breath, but like storm surf it gripped me - the sight of it, the blood beneath us, this thing that could not be undone - and held me under the waves. Swords broke across my back; spears blunted on my breastplate. Still I knelt there, gorgon-struck, as if even now my unbreakable flesh could be a shield to you.

Kleon of Athens died at Amphipolis that day. I did not realize until later that I was the one who did it: taking his neck between my fingers and crushing it to bone-skin slurry. Cutting the stream of his words like the slam of a sluice gate. It was a story told to me in flashes, glimpses of myself in the mouths of others. They said I moved like thunder, like fire from Olympos, cold and rooted as a mountain.

I would not know. I was not there.

\---

The days afterward felt strange and distended, like dye blooming in water. I could not tell you what I did, whom I spoke to, or even if I slept. It came back to me in fragments: a charge here, a skirmish there, each blade-clash and battlecry returning like the pieces of an ancient mosaic.

We unleashed ourselves on them, sawblades on soft bellies. I saw the men at the front turn to us with terror in their open mouths, and thought: this is  _deimos_ , the knowledge that you are looking at your death. Some raised their shields to me; most threw down their weapons so that they might run faster.

As we tore through them, swords and teeth through unguarded flank, the helots at the north gate dropped their pretense. They seized their shields and arms and flooded from the city as hornets from a hive, with ravenous Lysander braying and bellowing at their head. Though you feared them unready, their time with you was not wasted. They moved like lions, like jackals. They fed with the rage of the desperate, with the hunger of those who know what freedom is, and how the lack of it cuts.

The evils of war mounted and piled around us. Flesh opened, muscles exposed, limbs bent backward: cruelties that to me had become ordinary. The ground was slick with intestine. You could not walk without stepping over the fallen - a field of greaves and breastplates, of helmets parting shyly around bone and brain, glimpses of mortality like pale pink coral.

You and I fought as we have since the start: as one. This has always been our greatest gift, a thing I could not explain even to myself. Synchronicity, a bizarre accord of body and intent - how many times have we spoken without speaking, or moved like the sun had magnetized us? But on that day I did not think of the way we fit into each other. I could think only of how the horrors at my feet might look on you. I thought of the thinness of your armor, the spaces between its golden scales, the soft bare skin of your throat.

Every day I spent with you, I saw where your blood pooled, where your mortality sat. I saw the places I might strike to end your life. I knew he would see them too.

My brother took to the field like a god on the plains of Troy: selfish, furious, singular in his purpose. All around him, his army died, but he did not care. He was not here to save or defend them - he was the weapon of Athens, after all, not the shield. He slid through the violence like water through stones, watched Sparta eat its enemies raw, and did not lift a finger. He had his own wants, and no time for the passions of nations.

He knew the way to defeat me. He bypassed my body and struck at my heart.

There is a chasm then. A hole in my mind, as if entire moments have been ripped from me. I am thankful for that.

The battle was over in a few hours. They spent the evening taking the bodies from the field. The shorewater, once white with seafoam and fish spawn, had turned pink, and the trophies of war sat and baked in the sun.

When two armies meet on the field, all anyone will talk about afterwards are the figures. How many men were killed? How many hoplites, how many peltasts, slingers, horsemen? Which general had the better plan, which the braver soldiers? The answer at Amphipolis was so clear that the bards stammered to sing of it, for it was almost impossible to believe: a victory so absolute, so decisive, that our enemies must have thought it divine punishment.

Of fifteen hundred Athenians, half or more died that day. And of the seven hundred Lakedaimonians that fought, only seven were lost. They like to call this a miracle, a mark of your brilliance.

I say it is a cruel joke. One of them was you.

\---

For a while, there was no more fighting. How could there be? The men Athens lost in the north were strong soldiers and scions of noble families, not easily replaced. The ones that survived went home safely with their ships and their dead, and could have fought again - but they remembered the feeling of eclipse, I’m sure. They felt the certainty of death looking down at them out of your army’s feral eyes, and were not eager to relive it.

Without Kleon there was no one to keen for blood, and without you there was no one to defy him. Watching that great vain empire struggle to remake its war machine, to tax its remaining colonies to destitution and sift new soldiers from every hamlet and lowborn house, was like watching a speared whale flounder in the shallows.

What we did that day did not end the war. But it chopped at the foundations.

Amphipolis celebrated for weeks. You would think it an empire itself, the way it roared. The mania came in waves, like the tide after a storm: one day a delirious parade, the next a cluster of windows lit in private revelry, the next a mess of flowers, of bear’s breeches and jugs of wine lying trampled in the streets. They ripped Athens out of themselves, as one might carve away rotting flesh - breaking down their monuments, scrubbing their founders and colonizers from their histories. The old rituals no longer satisfied them, and so they made new games and new offerings, all in your name.

How I would have loved to watch you hide your face at that.

I feared for Amphipolis in its drunken bliss. It was foolishness, I thought, blind frenzy - the simple joy of people who did not understand that power was beneath everything, and that their triumph could be unraveled at any moment if just the right person were to tug on its threads. But I was too cynical. The colonies of Chalkidike were colonies no longer, and more than a match for the husk of Athens.

They burned the letters. They barred ships from the port, and turned away the messengers, and all the while your allies guarded them. Just as I held you on the sand, my body over yours like armor, so did Nemesis and Lysander and Alekto and her vengeful huntresses stand unflinching before the thing they had sworn to protect. Only they were not too late.

Sparta sent envoys, too. Three mounted generals, with tall spears and bronze armor and brilliant horsehair crests that dragged in the dirt. They came to convince your captains to stand down, to return the rightful property of Athens so that nerves might be calmed and an accord reached - but they met me first.

How could I not place you beside them? I compared their eyes to yours, their wit, their expressions, the steadiness of their voices, the pride in their straight backs. A quaver shook the air when they began to fear me. I tried to imagine them in your shadow, filling the hole you left, and laughed.

“Go home,” I told them. “You are not equal to this.”

We went back to Sparta on the golden edge of autumn. There was a stable peace by then, for the towns in the north had formed ranks and risen to their own defense, and at last a truce came that was agreeable to all. The army was good to me: walking at my side, meeting me each morning with hands open and eyes raised. They invited me to hunt and fish with them, and let me help with the animals. In all those weeks on the road, not one of them bowed. I was not beseeched, or fawned upon, or named Athena incarnate. If they saw me as golden light or some divine image, then they did not show it. In those days I would have preferred to be invisible, but it gave me some comfort to feel ordinary: like flesh on earth, another tired mortal marching home.

They collected on your gambit. There was no escaping it; Archidamos had sworn before his council that he would trade victory for liberty, and he was made to honor that promise. Under the eye of all Sparta, the army of the north went free, filling the streets with their savage delight and leading their families and blood-siblings in dances around the temple of Athena.

I followed them, watching for slave-killers. But they did not come.

Some of those freemen made a home in Lakonia, to replace old memories with new. Some married Spartiates - determined to blur the bloodlines, to fold themselves into the fabric of our people until you could not tell a mongrel from a noble - and some worked in the night, crewing the boats and carts that smuggled helots past the borders of their servitude.

Others, like Alekto and her razor-eyed daughter, left alone with King Archidamos’s begrudging gratitude jangling in their pockets.

As for Lysander - I watched him grow into his strength, into that feral scrutiny that probed and jabbed and kept you grounded. He whetted his mind against the challenges our country set against him, driven by the memory of your work, and by the things he might improve in it. I watched him love a king, and watched that love turn to glass and shatter in his hands. I saw his mistakes and his triumphs, and listened to the things they said about him - tyrant, liar, in fear or disgust.

And I saw him smile his wide shark’s grin. For he was free, and those choices were his.

The day before she left Lakonia, Nemesis found me sitting alone under an old olive tree in Pitana, beaten with age and memory. The sun was low in the sky, and she was dressed for travel, with a pack and provisions on her back. I think she had begun to find Sparta small and trite, and meant to go in search of new tests - a proper scope on which to grind her skill.

“Real Kassandra, who does not want to be a god,” she said to me. In her green eyes I saw the sharp wisdom that won you the north. “You have strength to spare. Give it freely.”

\---

It was nearly winter when I saw my brother again.

I had been two seasons without you. Truth be told, those days passed as blinks; I had not yet found anything worth my heed. I came back to myself on the peak of Taygetos, the edge of the world, feeling the cold mountain air bite my lungs and watching my mother weep - for there I came to a choice, and I could not choose without my wits about me.

You called her a compass. Sailing a wide ocean of grief in silence and dignity, pointed towards a bright star only she could see. She lost sight of it for a while, during those months she searched for me in Athens, terrified that she would never make right what had broken between us. But she never stopped wanting it - her constellation re-formed, her happiness restored. She only stopped telling me.

Do you know how hard it was? How it struck my soul like hoofbeats on granite to hold him to me while he howled? How it burned to look at him - that hateful homunculus with a heart like braided screams, the man who put out the light in your eyes - and forgive?

I held his glass edges against me. I let them cut and tear me. I felt the blood pool around me, and I knelt in it, as you knelt in the blood of your dearest friend.

We felt it - do you remember? That edge of cunning hidden in Lagos’s winter-lake calm, in those wise eyes folded so deeply you could not pull his intentions from him with a pincer. We saw the wrinkle in the air, the threat. Still you showed him your back, because you believed. Our people would have called it the worst kind of foolishness.

My brother, my shadow. A soul trapped in rot. Tarnished by it, gold turned grey. He swore and cried in that cold mountain air. He tried to hurt me. Still I did not strike at him.

How fortunate it was for him - for all of us - that I have known you. That I have seen you forgive our people despite their poison; that I have seen you choose them over yourself, and over me. You had so much love in you that it spilled from your eyes, your breath, your words, and it is all I have left of you.

I failed your friend Lagos, and I failed the girl who might have been my daughter, and I failed you. I will not fail the ghost you left.

\---

My mothers were a goddess and a princess. A weaver-warrior, and an iconoclast. I was born of blood and ichor, sprung to life like the spark of a forge-hammer. My youth was filled with curiosities: why did I stand over the boys of my age? Why did the air seem to shake and silver where I walked? Why did my steps ring on the earth if I did not suppress them, and why did I bear such a thirst for peril, for adventure and vertigo?

For a time, these questions delighted the man who called himself my father, a man my mother adored. She likes to tell me that he loved me long before he feared me - but that is not much use to me. The fear is all I can remember.

I learned quickly to hide my gleam. To look away, to ignore words. To be careful with my eyes, which would draw you in for a reason you did not know. But there were some things I could not secret away, and they caused me a lifetime of violence. My life was filled with those who would cross me, test me, bring war and blood to my feet, for no mortal can resist challenging a god.

They call it  _hubris_ , arrogance in the face of the divine - but who in my life did not dabble in that crime? My father did not sit in the dark with his faith and honor; he threw the blood of Athena from a sacred mountain. The demagogues of Athens mounted their platforms and demanded worship, and the kings of Sparta stood on their battlefields like the Furies themselves to send scores of shades to the underworld before their time. And the hooded snakes of Kosmos…

Well. You already know why they sought my brother and me. You knew what we were - even if, for my sake, you convinced yourself otherwise.  

To be half a god is not what mortals think. It is not just strength, is not just speed and height and a silver sheen. It is a chariot out of control, a flame that burns behind the eyes. It made me rough and impatient, quick to anger when I found something that would not bend. And it was a task I could not put down. All my life I have seen things I would rather look away from - war, abuse, the powerful bearing down on the weak, and an enemy cut to my shape, with my face and my power and my short temper. So often I wished that I could look upon these things and turn my back and live only for myself, as mortals do.

Mortals, I should say, other than you.

_To see that something is wrong, to have the power to change it, but to do nothing…_

I was the one who said it first. But I am not sure who learned it from whom.

\---

Golden Aigyptos, full of architects. Anatolia, the crossroads of the world. Thrake with its music and old epics, and Oinotria covered in vines. Phoinike, and Illyria, and Persia, and Babylon.

The world felt raw and fragile, laid open like a muscle under a scalpel. But all these places still stood, and so did I.

I built a ship to take me away from the land I knew. Long-hulled, with a low rail and a dagger-sharp keel, made for speed. I crewed her with women: Spartan or Athenian or Theban or Thrakian, it did not matter - they only had to be restless, eager to hold a shape different than the one given to them.

I blacked the boat’s hull with Chalkidikian pitch. Her masts and spars I hewed from Akanthan timber. On her wooden ribs I painted kind brown eyes. I named her for the goddess of balance, she who cannot be escaped - for I would use her to chase down all the world’s joys.

The sea opened before me like wings. I have always loved its dark storms, its squalling tumult, its cold spray like a rain of needles. I cut through those ancient waters and walked on the lands we dreamed of. There was a new person to meet every day, a new thing to learn - always more stories to hear or tell or remember.

It was on those far white shores that I learned how the bards favor the conqueror. They have no interest in the hearts of softer men.

When the ocean wore me down I would go home to my family, so that we might sit and drink and tell each other of what we had seen. That water was rough at first; our hurts still intersected, compounded, and none of us knew how to bend. There were times we could not look at each other, and times we feared our pain was indelible. But a steady stream will carve the strongest rock, and we did find our shape.

Sometimes I thought of the north, of those sweet mornings we passed in warmth and whispers. I thought of my silphium phial, the poison I drank for fear of spears and snakes, and spent my nights dreaming of daughters. Finally, when I believed I was ready, I went again to the place where I lost you.

Amphipolis was different when I returned. Vaster, richer. The walls had grown, and the buildings were tall and white and full of new wealth. It wore no colors on its battlements, for the truce - and its strength - had held fast. Still the stone that bore your name stood at the heart of the city, in its place of honor.

I crouched before it. Passed my fingers over the letters - carved solid and square, the same careful writing that scored your lambskin maps all that time ago - and spoke your name aloud, as I had not dared to in years.

It was strong, lyrical. Like you. The letters leapt from the headstone. I remembered things I could not yet bear: breathless laughing, the smell of sweat and iron. The touch of your wide scarred hands prickled on my skin, and your gaze fell on me, warm and silent as the eyes on my hull.

Those fragments were like jackals, hungry at my heels. I had to leave, or they might have eaten me whole.

I crossed the ocean and walked the earth and looked for things to mend. I punished those who preyed on weakness, and offered strength to those who wanted it. I repaired what I believed was broken; never again did I turn away. I drank and dined with queens and kings, and saw wars won, cities fallen, new ones built on their bones. Everywhere I went, I sang with poets and danced with bards, until their legends and languages lay smooth on my tongue. I told them my stories, and when it came to you, when those long nights became whisper-quiet and the past closed around me like summer heat, I said:

These are the things he gave.

Strength. Will. Courage, and the compassion to temper it. His eyes and mind, whose equal I have never known.

The truth, when it was necessary. A lie when it might save lives. His oath, so that something unjust might be remade, and his life, so that he would not break it.

To his friend, a choice. To a courageous widow, a world where her son would not ache for death and glory.

To our people: a chance. Solid ground in a sea of quicksand, upon which they planted their feet and made themselves free.

To me, my family - a harbor from the world, a constellation re-formed - and a heart full of memories, to save and shelter me after long cold days on the sea.

I would say all of these things are worth a song or story. All of them more, and better, than the heads of our enemies.

Wouldn't you agree?

 

\--- X ---

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... hi!  
> to all who have made it this far: thank you SO MUCH for reading. I have loved every single minute of this: the writing, the research, the random standing around in pretty locations in odyssey for inspiration, and nerding out with you guys about our favorite power couple and ancient military history.  
> the support I’ve gotten for this along the way is absolutely unbelievable, and I can’t express how much your feedback has inspired and kept me going. feel free to drop me a comment - it would mean the world to me to hear your thoughts, or just that you enjoyed reading :)


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